The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico

In the Introduction to Broken Spears, the volume’s editor, Miguel León-Portilla, paints a detailed picture of the Aztec world before the arrival of the Spanish on November 8, 1519.

The first human beings arrived on the American continent around twenty thousand years ago; the first settlers in Mexico, around ten thousand years later. The earliest architectural settlements in Mexico date to around 500 BCE. After a slow start, Central America’s empires took shape. Around the turn of the millennium, the Mesoamerican cultural mega-center of Teotihuacan was at full strength. The Mayas, a powerful cultural group at the time, developed a partly ideographic, partly phonetic form of writing in the fourth and fifth centuries, but for reasons unknown, Teotihuacan and other Mayan civic centers declined in the eighth and ninth centuries.

As Europe consolidated its feudal system in the ninth century, a new power rose in Central America: the Toltec Empire. In their capital city of Tula, the Toltec people built on and expanded the civilizational developments of Teotihuacan. According to Indigenous texts, the Toltecs were “superb artisans, devout worshippers, skillful tradesman—extraordinary persons in every way” (xxx). But the Toltecs, like the Mayas, lacked staying power, eventually abandoning Tula.