Marching in from the causeway across Lake Texcoco with roughly 400 soldiers and thousands of indigenous allies, Cortés was received with wary ceremony by Moctezuma II in the heart of the Aztec capital, one of the largest cities in the world at the time. The meeting, cloaked in gifts and diplomatic caution on both sides, set in motion the events that within two years would destroy the Aztec Empire.
Tenochtitlan stunned the Spanish—a city of causeways, canals, floating gardens, and pyramids rising from a lake, home to perhaps 200,000 people, larger than any city in Spain. Cortés's soldier-chronicler Bernal Díaz later wrote that some of the men wondered if they were dreaming, comparing the city to the enchanted worlds of chivalric romance.
Moctezuma, uncertain whether the strangers were emissaries of the god Quetzalcoatl or simply dangerous foreign warriors, chose diplomacy over immediate confrontation, housing the Spaniards in a palace and showering them with gifts of gold—which only sharpened Spanish appetite for conquest. Within months Cortés had taken Moctezuma hostage in his own capital; within two years, after brutal sieges, smallpox epidemics, and the massacre at the Great Temple, Tenochtitlan lay in ruins and the Aztec Empire was finished, opening the way for three centuries of Spanish colonial rule across Mexico.
Key people: Hernán Cortés, Moctezuma II