The Mexica (Aztec) and Inca Empires

Two capitals in the clouds and on the water

In 1519, Spanish soldiers looked down on Tenochtitlan and compared it to an enchanted city from a romance novel. The Mexica capital stood on an island in Lake Texcoco, joined to the shore by long causeways, with an aqueduct bringing fresh water, great temples, a vast market and canals full of canoes. Its population is estimated at anywhere from about 50 000 to over 200 000; even the low figures make it larger than most European cities of the time.

Thousands of kilometres south, the Inca capital Cusco sat at about 3 400 metres in the Andes, at the centre of a road network stretching from what is now Ecuador to Chile. They were the two largest states in the Americas, and large by any world standard in 1500. This lesson studies them before the Spanish invasions (covered in Conquest and Colonization in the Americas).

The Mexica (Aztec) Empire

• Who: the Mexica were Nahuatl-speaking people who, according to their own histories, founded Tenochtitlan around 1325. ("Aztec" is a later name; historians increasingly say Mexica.)
• The Triple Alliance (1428): Tenochtitlan joined with Texcoco and Tlacopan. Together they dominated central Mexico. It was a tribute empire: conquered city-states kept their own rulers but sent regular tribute (maize, cotton cloth, cacao, feathers, warriors' costumes) to the alliance. The Codex Mendoza, made by Indigenous artists for the Spanish around 1541, lists these tribute payments in pictures.
• Government: the huey tlatoani ("great speaker") was chosen from the royal family by a council of nobles. Moctezuma II ruled from 1502 to 1520.
• Society: nobles (pipiltin), commoners (macehualtin) organized in neighbourhood units called calpolli, long-distance merchants (pochteca), and enslaved people (often through debt or punishment; their children were born free). Schools trained young people, including commoners, in religion, history and war.
• Farming: chinampas, raised fields built from mud and plants in the shallow lake, produced several harvests a year.
• Religion: many deities, including Huitzilopochtli (sun and war) and Tlaloc (rain), honoured at the Templo Mayor. The Mexica believed the gods had sacrificed themselves to create the world, and that humans owed them offerings, including human sacrifice of war captives. Spanish writers later exaggerated this to justify conquest; archaeology at the Templo Mayor confirms that sacrifice did happen, on a large scale. Historians try to explain it within Mexica beliefs rather than use it to label a whole people.
• Culture: poetry, music and philosophy; Nezahualcoyotl (1402 to 1472), ruler of Texcoco, is remembered as a poet and engineer.
• Weak point: many subject peoples resented tribute, and the Tlaxcalans were never conquered. This mattered in 1519.

The Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu)

• Name: the Inca called their empire Tawantinsuyu, "the four parts together", in Quechua.
• Growth: Pachacuti (ruled from about 1438) and his successors Topa Inca and Huayna Capac expanded the empire into the largest state in the Americas, perhaps around 10 million people (estimates vary widely).
• Government: the Sapa Inca was seen as the son of the sun god Inti. Officials and local lords (kurakas) ran a decimal system of households (units of 10, 100, 1 000 and 10 000). Conquered peoples were sometimes resettled (mitmaq) to secure loyalty.
• Economy without markets or money: the Inca economy ran largely on labour. Each ayllu (kin-based community) worked its own land and owed mit'a, turns of labour for the state: farming state and temple fields, building roads, serving as soldiers. The state stored food and cloth in thousands of storehouses (qollqa) and redistributed it in hard times and at festivals.
• Records: khipu (knotted cords) kept by trained specialists recorded census and tribute data.
• Infrastructure: about 30 000 km or more of roads (Qhapaq Ñan), suspension bridges of woven grass, relay runners (chasquis), and terraced fields on steep slopes. Machu Picchu was built in the mid-1400s, probably as an estate for Pachacuti.
• Crisis: Huayna Capac died around 1527, probably in an epidemic that had spread from Spanish settlements before any Spaniard reached Peru. His sons Huascar and Atahualpa fought a civil war, which Atahualpa had just won when Pizarro arrived in 1532.

Other peoples of the Americas

The Mexica and Inca were not the only societies. Maya city-states in the Yucatán and Guatemala continued to thrive in smaller states; the last independent Maya kingdom, the Itza at Nojpetén, held out against Spain until 1697. The Purépecha (Tarascans) of western Mexico were never conquered by the Mexica. Across the continents lived hundreds of other Nations, from farming peoples of the Amazon and the Mississippi Valley to the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest and the Nations of what is now Canada (see First Nations, Inuit and Early Contact in Northern North America).

Continuity today: more than a million people in Mexico speak Nahuatl, and millions in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador speak Quechua. These are living languages, not relics.