It featured gardens, palaces, temples and raised roads with bridges that connected the city to the mainland. He set sail from Cuba on the morning of February 18, to begin an unauthorized expedition to Mesoamerica. Aguilar turned out to be an invaluable asset to Cortes due to his ability to speak Chontal, the local Mayan language.
Malinalli became baptized with the Christian name Marina, and was later known as La Malinche. Driven from the capital, the Spanish later circled back with a small fleet of ships. Meanwhile, another factor began to take its toll. Unbeknownst to the Spanish, some among their ranks had been infected with smallpox when they had departed Europe.
Once these men arrived in the Americas, the virus began to spread—both among their indigenous allies and the Aztecs. The first known case reportedly emerged in Cempoala —one of the city-states that had allied with the Spanish—when an enslaved African came down with the disease.
The virus then spread. Aztec troops, members of the noble class, farmers and artisans all fell victim to the disease. While many Spaniards had acquired an immunity to the disease, the virus was new in the Americas and few Indigenous understood it. Yellow fever, which is carried by Cary Stayner, the serial killer convicted in the grisly murders of four women near Yosemite National Park, is born on August 13, Responding to increasing Soviet pressure on western Berlin, U.
The massive resupply effort, carried out in weather so bad that some pilots referred to it as The German engineer Felix Wankel, inventor of a rotary engine that will be used in race cars, is born on August 13, , in Lahr, Germany. Wankel reportedly came up with the basic idea for a new type of internal combustion gasoline engine when he was only 17 years old. In , Live TV.
This Day In History. History Vault. Latin America. Art, Literature, and Film History. This Day in History. His forces then marched on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan modern Mexico City , where Moctezuma welcomed him.
The Spaniards were driven out of Tenochtitlan and nearly wiped out, but they ultimately returned and laid siege to the city. Particularly strategic were communities which had been subject to the Aztecs, who had heavily taxed the people and practiced human sacrifice. What happened next is unclear.
He returned with thousands of Indian allies, who opposed the Aztecs. After a four month siege, during which time Aztec defenders succumbed as much to disease and starvation as to the force of arms, the new Aztec king Cuautemoc surrendered. By , most of central Mexico was integrated under Spanish control in the kingdom of New Spain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, , — The strange end of the Aztec nation remains one of the most fascinating events in the annals of human societies.
Why did a strong people defending its own territory succumb so quickly to a handful of Spaniards fighting in dangerous and completely unfamiliar circumstances? The answers to these questions lie in the fact that at the time of the Spanish arrival, the Aztec and Inca Empires faced grave internal difficulties brought on by their religious ideologies; by the Spaniards' boldness, timing, and technology; and by Aztec and Inca psychology and attitudes toward war.
The Spaniards arrived in late summer, when the Aztecs were preoccupied with harvesting their crops and not thinking of war. From the Spaniards' perspective, their timing was ideal. A series of natural phenomena, signs, and portents seemed to augur disaster for the Aztecs. A comet was seen in daytime, a column of fire had appeared every midnight for a year, and two temples were suddenly destroyed, one by lightning unaccompanied by thunder. These and other apparently inexplicable events seemed to presage the return of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and had an unnerving effect on the Aztecs.
They looked on the Europeans riding "wild beasts" as extraterrestrial forces coming to establish a new social order. Defeatism swept the nation and paralyzed its will. The Aztec state religion, the sacred cult of Huitzilopochtli, necessitated constant warfare against neighboring peoples to secure captives for religious sacrifice and laborers for agricultural and infrastructure work.
Lacking an effective method of governing subject peoples, the Aztecs controlled thirty-eight provinces in central Mexico through terror. When the Spaniards appeared, the Totonacs greeted them as liberators, and other subject peoples joined them against the Aztecs. Montezuma faced terrible external and internal difficulties. Historians have often condemned the Aztec ruler for vacillation and weakness. But he relied on the advice of his state council, itself divided, and on the dubious loyalty of tributary communities.
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