How did a few hundred Spaniards topple the Aztec empire, and did the Aztecs think they were gods?
Cortés did not conquer Mexico with a few hundred men. He did it with tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, an interpreter named Malinche, and a plague.
▶ Start the storyA few hundred Spaniards did not topple the Aztec empire on their own. Between 1519 and 1521 Hernán Cortés and his small army of Europeans overthrew it with the help of a large allied army of Indigenous . When Cortés marched back on Tenochtitlan, his combined army numbered up to 100,000 warriors, and the overwhelming majority were Indigenous rather than Spanish.
up to 100,000
Why would they join him? The Aztecs ruled through local rulers and demanded tribute, and their power rested on the perception of unchallengeable military supremacy, a system vulnerable to a loss of prestige. Cortés allied with city-states and political rivals, particularly the Tlaxcaltecs, who had fought the Aztecs' for almost a century and felt great hatred and bitterness toward them.
On the way, Cortés relied on an interpreter. Malinche, a Nahua woman who was one of 20 enslaved women given to the Spaniards in 1519, spoke Nahuatl and Maya. Cortés spoke Spanish to Aguilar, who spoke Yucatec Maya to Malinche, who spoke Nahuatl. Historians still disagree about why she helped, and in Mexico she remains a symbol of treachery, of victimhood, or of the mother of the Mexican people.
Then came disaster for the Aztecs. After the Spaniards were driven out in the in 1520, a smallpox plague starting in September 1520 lasted seventy days and killed many, including the new emperor Cuitláhuac. When Cortés and his allies returned in 1521 they found a civilisation weakened by famine and smallpox, and Tenochtitlan fell on 13 August 1521.
And were the Spaniards taken for gods? That famous story is contested. In his own letters written at the time, Cortés never claimed to have been seen as a god; the idea appears only in the 1540s, in writings by Europeans, and historians such as Camilla Townsend suggest the Spaniards made it up.
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Recap
Cortés won with allies, an interpreter and a plague, not just with weapons: the Aztec empire fell partly because its subjects had a reason to change sides.
💡 A trick to remember it · Picture three keys turning in Tenochtitlan's gate: an army of allies, a voice that could cross languages, and a sickness no one could see.
Surprising fact · Most of the warriors in Cortés's army were Indigenous, and the story that the Aztecs thought him a god is contested.
Connects to
- 🤝 How did three cities rule an empire by collecting tribute?
- 🦅 Why did the Aztecs build their capital on a swampy island in a lake?
- 🌎 How many people died in the Americas after 1492, and was it mostly disease?
- 🥔 Why was the Columbian exchange so lopsided: potatoes one way, smallpox the other?
- Colonialism
Sources (3)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (19 claims) cites at least one of these.