THE FALL OF TENOCHTITLAN: ALLIANCE, DISEASE, AND REGIME REPLACEMENT
What followed the arrival of Spanish Soldier Hernán CORTÉS in 1519 was not a duel between Europe and Mesoamerica, nor the triumph of a handful of Spaniards over a mighty empire. It was, as historian Stefan Rinke emphasizes, a multilateral civil war inside central Mexico, accelerated by foreign opportunists and biological catastrophe.
The so-called “conquest of Mexico” was, more precisely, the fall of Tenochtitlan—a prolonged war fought by European conquistadors together with tens of thousands of Indigenous allies against the Mexica imperial center.
Most of the fighters were not Spanish. “In 1517, the Spanish sent a reconnaissance expedition to the east coast of Mexico.” In 1519, Cortés, determined to conquer the great empire the 1517 expedition reported, and “500 men from Spain’s Cuban settlement” landed on the shore the reconnaissance had mapped. His men thought Cortés was crazy and wanted to return to Cuba. He “had to burn his own ships to prevent them from retreating back to Cuba.”
Most of the dead from the wars the invaders instigated were Indigenous. The Spaniards did not defeat the Mexica/Aztecs alone; they positioned themselves at the head of a vast coalition of subject and recently conquered peoples who already resented Mexica tribute, military extraction, and ritualized terror.
This distinction overturns the enduring myth—still taught, filmed, and romanticized—that a few hundred Europeans shattered an empire by courage or superior culture. They did not. They entered a fractured political landscape already primed for revolt.
INDIGENOUS ALLIES: THE REAL ARMY
By 1519, the Mexica empire had expanded faster than it could integrate. Many altepetl [independent nations] had been conquered only recently. They paid tribute but remained politically alienated, militarily burdened, and ritually exploited.
When the Spaniards arrived with unfamiliar weapons, animals, and tactics, they did not create resistance—they triggered it.
Montezuma, the Mexica ruler, did not destroy Cortés’s forces on their beachhead while he had the chance, but provided them with facilities to move from the coast to the Valley of Mexico. ” [Harman, 165]
Indigenous leaders recognized an opening. Aligning with the newcomers was a desperate gamble, but one that offered a chance to break free from Mexica domination.
TLAXCALANS and other subject groups supplied the bulk of the troops, bore the heaviest losses, and fought the most sustained battles. In Indigenous accounts, they did not see themselves as victims of conquest alone, but as conquistadors themselves—participants in overthrowing a hated regime.
Cortés’s letters to the Spanish Crown erase Indigenous agency almost entirely. The war, on paper, appears Spanish-led and Spanish-won. Only when Indigenous records are read alongside European ones does the fuller picture emerge: a coalition war, not a foreign invasion in isolation.
By 1519, the Mexica empire had expanded faster than it could integrate. Many altepetl [independent nations] had been conquered only recently. They paid tribute but remained politically alienated, militarily burdened, and ritually exploited.
When the Spaniards arrived with unfamiliar weapons, animals, and tactics, they did not create resistance—they triggered it.
Cortés and his native allies coordinated their assault on Tenochtitlan.
MALINCHE, Cortés’s Slave, NEGOTIATED & SPYED for him
Without Malinche, the Spaniards would likely have failed early. Given to Cortés as an enslaved woman, she became indispensable—fluent in Nahuatl and Maya, and later in Spanish —enabling negotiations, intelligence gathering, alliance-building, and political manipulation.
Cortés barely mentions her. Later chroniclers downplay her role. Yet without her, the Europeans—utter strangers to Mesoamerican state systems—would have been blind and isolated. Translation was not ancillary; it was strategic infrastructure.
Aztec religion contained multiple layers that are often flattened in modern accounts. At its deepest stratum lay an inherited partnership-oriented Mesoamerican cosmology, in which humans, Earth, and the Sun were bound in reciprocal obligation: life endured because nourishment—symbolic and literal—flowed between worlds. Over time, however—especially under late imperial rulers—the Mexica elevated Huitzilopochtli, a solar war deity who promised eternal life to those who died violently but who demanded constant human blood to survive his daily struggle against darkness. What had once been reciprocal cosmology increasingly hardened into state ideology. Montezuma did not face an external enemy alone. He faced internal strain, escalating tribute demands, ecological pressure, and ritual obligations that left little room for flexibility. Educated as a priest before becoming ruler, Moctezuma governed as a ritual fulcrum rather than a military innovator. Ceremony hardened. Access narrowed. Authority became sacred—and brittle.
As alliances formed against him, Montezuma hesitated. He received the Spaniards not as invaders to be destroyed immediately, but as anomalous actors to be ritually interpreted, managed, and delayed. That hesitation proved fatal. Once the Mexica center faltered, the periphery surged.
Cortés “pretended to befriend Moctezuma, then took him captive.” The smallpox germs the Spanish loosed on Tenochtitlan killed “a large number of people” just before the Spaniards besieged the city. Cortés’s men’s steel “amour and swords could slash through the thick cloth that served as armor of the Aztecs. Cortés stationed boats to block canoes carrying food and supplies that the Aztecs tried to bring into the city.
At one point, “Cortés was forced to flee Tenochtitlan and lost most of his army.”
DISEASE: THE UNSEEN WEAPON
No factor reshaped the war more decisively than epidemic disease. Smallpox, introduced unintentionally by Europeans, tore through Mesoamerica with catastrophic speed. Entire communities collapsed. Leadership structures vanished. Mortality soared.
In the chaos, Spaniards exploited the vacuum.
They replaced Indigenous elites, co-opted others through marriage, installed young or weak rulers they could control, and gradually positioned themselves atop a shattered political order. What began as opportunistic raiding evolved—almost accidentally—into the foundations of Europe’s first large colonial empire in the Americas.
This was not a master plan executed from Madrid. It was an improvisation born of violence, alliance, demographic collapse, and exploitation.
NOT A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS—A REGIME SWAP
The fall of Tenochtitlan was not the victory of “civilization” over “barbarism.” Spain was not morally superior—only greedier, better armed, and better fed. A larger predator entered a weakened ecosystem.
Ritual extraction gave way to colonial extraction. Human sacrifice ended—but forced labor, land seizure, and demographic collapse replaced it. Domination continued under new symbols.
Indigenous peoples were not passive victims in this process. They were active historical agents, fighting for their own survival and advantage within catastrophic constraints. That agency does not absolve colonialism—but it demolishes the myth of European inevitability.
The Mexica empire fell not because the Spaniards were heroic, but because fear had replaced intelligence, ritual had replaced coordination, and too many enemies were waiting for the center to break.
1519–1521: Spanish Administrators, Priests, and Soldiers Ran Mexico
Spanish Administrators
After the initial conquest, Spanish administrators quickly appropriated Aztec systems of tribute, land control, and labor. Rather than dismantling Indigenous governance entirely, they redirected it: existing local leaders were often retained but subordinated to Spanish authority. Tribute once flowing to Moctezuma II and Tenochtitlan was rerouted to encomenderos, the Crown, and colonial cities.
Spanish Priests
Catholic priests operated alongside soldiers and officials, framing conquest as spiritual rescue. Temples were dismantled or converted into churches, Indigenous rituals suppressed, and mass baptisms conducted—often coercively. While some friars documented Nahua language and customs, their primary function was to replace Aztec religious authority with Christian doctrine, reinforcing Spanish political control.
Combined Effect
Together, soldiers broke resistance, administrators extracted resources, and priests reshaped belief systems. The result was not immediate annihilation of Aztec society but a forced transformation: Indigenous structures survived only insofar as they served colonial rule, with catastrophic demographic loss following from violence, disease, and exploitation.
REFERENCES
Harman, C., 2017, A People’s History of the World, Verso [pp 165-167, excellent summary]
Conquistadors and Aztecs, Oxford University Press.
Cortés, H. 1519-1526 Cartas de Relación: Essential but highly self-serving primary source.
Díaz del Castillo, B., 1568, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. A later corrective narrative that still minimizes Indigenous agency.
Indigenous Nahua annals and pictorial codices (various) reveal Indigenous self-identification as participants in conquest and document alliance dynamics absent from Spanish texts.
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