Smallpox reaches Tenochtitlan

Assembled from 20 blocks · 2 evidence · 15 related

1. Story
2. A smallpox epidemic swept the Mexica capital in the last months of 1520, in the interval between the expulsion of Cortés's force from the city and the siege that took it the following August. Among the dead was the ruler Cuitláhuac. The Nahua testimony gathered a generation later for Book XII of the Florentine Codex describes the disease from within the city: sores covering the body, immobility so complete that the sick could not turn over, and death by starvation for those with no one left able to bring them food. The military conquest of 1521 was conducted against a population already broken by an epidemic that had arrived ahead of the army.
3. Knowledge
4. Tenochtitlan
5. The post-contact population collapse of the Americas
6. Smallpox reaches Tenochtitlan
7. Connections
8. Tenochtitlan
9. The post-contact population collapse of the Americas
10. Smallpox reaches Tenochtitlan
11. The Columbian Exchange
12. The transatlantic slave trade
13. The 1610 CO₂ minimum ("Orbis spike")
14. Smallpox reaches Tenochtitlan
15. Atmospheric CO₂ reaches a minimum recorded in Antarctic ice
16. Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492
17. Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (Florentine Codex), Book XII
18. Evidence
19. 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.
20. 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.