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Over the next few months, Cortés founded a base at La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz (now Veracruz, Mexico), and his conquistadores moved west along the coast toward Aztec lands. Ritual human sacrifice did not always sit well with the vassal tribes.ĭiego Velázquez de Cuéllar giving Hernán Cortés command of the expedition to Mexico in the Museum of America, Madrid.

A key pillar of the Aztec religion was the belief that the gods had given their lives to create this world, so humans were bound to repay that debt in blood. The Aztecs demanded regular tributes of their conquered subjects, and often these tributes took the form of human sacrificial offerings. The tlatoani Montezuma II presided over the empire at its peak, but the cross-cultural expanse of his empire was also its weakness. They conferred absolute power on a tlatoani, or ruler. Arrival of the conquistadoresĪt the beginning of the 16th century, the Aztecs controlled a vast amount of territory containing 400 to 500 subjugated states. Cortés’s victory destroyed the Aztec empire, and the Spanish began to consolidate control over what became the colony of New Spain. Cortés’s army besieged Tenochtitlán for 93 days, and a combination of superior weaponry and a devastating smallpox outbreak enabled the Spanish to conquer the city. Spanish conquistadores commanded by Hernán Cortés allied with local tribes to conquer the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán.