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Updated: June 21, 2025
"It is the old battle-ground of Cortes, when he and his Spaniards and Tlascalans took the city of Mexico. It was called Tenochtitlan, then."
Instead of the lake of Tenochtitlan days there is the flattest of rich valleys beyond.
He could not make advances to her: he had no opportunity to do so: she was making advances to him! "My love," she said, standing before him, "I have come back to the world for your sake. Before Semitzin first saw you, her heart was yours. And I come to you, not poor, but with the riches and power of the princes of Tenochtitlan. You shall see them: they are yours! Kamaiakan, take down the chest."
"Aztecs from a place called Tenochtitlan. Twenty thousand of them got sacrificed in a bunch for some reason or other. Poor devils. They think this is some kind of heaven. They tell me this is easy work compared to the type they had to undergo. The Satheri like to get big bunches through in one conjuration, like the haul they made from the victims of somebody named Tamerlane."
The conquistadors, who did attempt to describe Tenochtitlán, misinterpreted it. They were from a feudalistic world and tried to portray the Aztecs in such terms. For instance, the large Indian community houses they thought were palaces. Actually, Montezuma was a democratically elected war chief of a confederation of three tribes which militarily dominated most of the Mexican valley.
In the midst of the territory, on the western shore of the large lake of Tezcuco, stood the city of Tenochtitlan, the superb capital of the unfortunate Montezuma, on the site of which has arisen the modern Mexico. Though its glory has long passed away, the enormous ruins which still remain attest its past grandeur.
The desert descended in a great hollow: you told me it was where, in former days, the ocean had been. At last there were rocky hills before us; we rode towards a great rock shaped like the pyramid on which the sacrifices were held in Tenochtitlan. We passed round its base, and entered a deep and narrow valley, that seemed to have been ploughed out of the heart of the earth and to descend into it.
We skirted the shore of dull Lake Texcoco, once so much larger and even now only a few inches below the level of the flat plain, recalling that the Tenochtitlan of the Conquest was an island reached only by causeways. At San Juan Teotihuacan, the famous pyramids lost in the nebulous haze of pre-Toltec history bulked forth from the plain and for many miles beyond.
At any rate, such is the tradition. It was a tradition or legend which played no small part in the conquest about to be effected. IV. The March to Tenochtitlan Into this loosely compact political and social organization, hard-headed, clear-sighted, iron-hearted, steel-clad Cortes precipitated himself.
To perpetuate the memory of this philosophic deduction he caused to be constructed at Tezcuco a stone tower nine stories in height, the ruins of which were visible long after the Spanish occupation. To this tower he gave the name Chililitli, a term of uncertain meaning, but which we find was applied in Tenochtitlan to a building sacred to the Nine Winds.
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