The Fall of the Aztecs

Why this matters

Cortes gets top billing in most retellings of 1521, but the numbers tell a different story: tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan warriors fought alongside a few hundred Spaniards, and smallpox weakened Tenochtitlan before the final siege even began. Bernal Diaz's own account of the causeway approach is only one thread in a much larger event.

A one-man narrative is harder to correct than it sounds, since the simple version is already the one most students carry in from movies and old textbooks. I weigh the eyewitness account against allies and disease so students get a concrete case for why crediting a single conqueror flattens what actually happened at Tenochtitlan.

From one teacher to another

The causeway into Tenochtitlan is where I start this one, with water on both sides and a city rising out of the lake that stopped Bernal Diaz's soldiers cold in 1519. I use his actual account of that walk so students don't take his word alone, they weigh it against Tlaxcalan allies numbering in the tens of thousands, plus a smallpox epidemic that did more to end the 1521 siege than any Spanish weapon. Most retellings hand Cortes all the credit for bringing down the Aztec Empire, and I made this one specifically to put that credit where it actually belongs.