Tenochtitlan

city · earth

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.