And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the
water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and
level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. These great
towns and cues and buildings rising from the water, all made of
stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tales of Amadis.
Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a
dream .
- Bernal Díaz
It's hardly surprising that Cortés and his followers should have
been so taken by their first sight of Tenochtitlán , capital
of the Aztecs. For what they found, built in the middle of a lake
traversed by great causeways, was a beautiful, strictly regulated,
stone-built city of 300,000 people, easily the equal of anything
they might have experienced in Europe. The Aztec people (or, as
they called themselves, the Mexica) had arrived at the lake, after
years of wandering and living off what they could scavenge or
pillage from settled communities, in around 1345. Their own legends
have it that Huitzilopochtli had ordered them to build a city where
they found an eagle perched on a cactus devouring a snake, and this
they duly saw on an island in the middle of the lake; this is the
basis of the nopal, eagle and snake motif that forms the
centrepiece of the modern Mexican flag and appears everywhere, from
coins and official seals to woven designs on rugs. The reality was
probably more desperate - driven from place to place, the lake
seemed a last resort - but for whatever reasons it proved an ideal
site. Well stocked with fish, it was also fertile, once they had
constructed their chinampas , or floating gardens of reeds,
and virtually impregnable, too: the causeways, when they were
completed, could be flooded and the bridges raised to thwart
attacks (or to escape, as the Spanish found to their cost on the
Noche Triste ).
The island city eventually grew to cover an area of some
thirteen square kilometres, much of it reclaimed from the lake, and
from this base the Aztecs were able to begin their programme of
expansion: first, dominating the valley by a series of strategic
alliances, war and treachery, and finally, in a period of less than
a hundred years before the Conquest, establishing an empire that
demanded tribute from and traded with the most distant parts of the
country