Tenochtitlan

Assembled from 9 blocks · 2 evidence · 1 related

1. Story
2. The Mexica capital, built on an island in Lake Texcoco and connected to the shore by causeways, with a population that contemporary estimates and modern reconstructions put among the largest of any city in the world at the time. It is in this Journey because it is the best-documented single case of the demographic catastrophe: a smallpox epidemic ran through the city in late 1520, between the expulsion of Cortés's force and its return, killing an enormous share of the population including the ruler Cuitláhuac, and the siege that took the city in August 1521 was conducted against a population already devastated. The Nahua accounts collected a generation later in Book XII of the Florentine Codex describe the epidemic from the inside — the sores, the immobility, the dead in the houses, the starvation of those who could not rise to fetch food. The city was then dismantled and Mexico City built on the same site, and the causeway grid still governs the street plan.
3. Knowledge
4. Tenochtitlan
5. Connections
6. Smallpox reaches Tenochtitlan
7. Evidence
8. Contemporary Nahua testimony describing the 1520 smallpox epidemic in Tenochtitlan from within the city. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — neither the manuscript nor a published edition was accessible. The description of the epidemic passage is given from the author's knowledge of the Anderson and Dibble translation. Note also that the Codex is a compilation made a generation after the events by informants recalling them, which is a limitation of the source itself and not only of this session.
9. Establishes the biological framing of post-1492 contact — crops, livestock and pathogens moving between hemispheres — used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: this session had no outbound network access (WebFetch blocked by egress policy, WebSearch budget exhausted), so the book was not consulted; the citation is given from the author's knowledge and the work is a standard, widely held title that a curator can verify in any research library catalogue.