Aztec Triple Alliance

State · 1429–1520 CE · at its largest around 1502 CE

The alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan formed after the defeat of Azcapotzalco, which built a tributary empire across central Mexico until the Spanish conquest led by Hernán Cortés.

On its lands while it lasted

Tenochtitlan (1325–1521 CE): Mexica (Aztec) capital founded on an island in Lake Texcoco; with causeways, canals and chinampa gardens it became one of the largest cities in the world.
Moctezuma II (c. 1466 CE – 1520 CE): Ninth tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, ruling the Aztec Empire at its height when Hernán Cortés arrived; he died in Spanish captivity in 1520.
Bartolomé de las Casas (c. 1484 CE – 1566 CE): Dominican friar and bishop of Chiapas who denounced Spanish abuses against indigenous peoples in his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.
Hernán Cortés (1485 CE – 1547 CE): Spanish conquistador whose expedition brought down the Aztec Empire, beginning the Spanish colonization of mainland Mexico.
Coatlicue statue (c. 1500 CE): A massive Aztec stone statue of the earth goddess Coatlicue, with a skirt of serpents and a necklace of hands and hearts, carved in Tenochtitlan. Unearthed in Mexico City’s main square in 1790, it is in the National Museum of Anthropology.
La Malinche (c. 1500 CE – 1529 CE): Nahua woman who became interpreter, adviser and intermediary for Hernán Cortés during the conquest of the Aztec Empire.
Aztec Sun Stone (c. 1502 CE): Massive carved basalt disc with calendrical and cosmological imagery, made in the late Aztec period and rediscovered in Mexico City in 1790.
Cortés’s conquest of the Mexica (1519–1521 CE): Cortés landed in 1519, won the Totonacs and Tlaxcalans as allies and took Moctezuma II prisoner in Tenochtitlan. Driven out in 1520, he returned with tens of thousands of allies and, after a siege worsened by smallpox, took the city in August 1521.
Moctezuma’s headdress (c. 1520 CE): A crest of hundreds of green quetzal feathers set with gold, made by Aztec featherworkers and said to have belonged to Moctezuma II. It reached Europe soon after the conquest and is now in Vienna.