Empire1428 – 1521 · 93 years
Aztec Empire
The Triple Alliance — three Nahuatl-speaking city-states that ruled most of central Mexico for a century.
What it was
Founded in 1428 by Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, the Aztec Empire extracted tribute from a population of perhaps 5–6 million people across central and southern Mexico. Cortés arrived in 1519 and Tenochtitlan fell in 1521, helped enormously by Indigenous allies who had no love for the Aztec tribute system.
Why it mattered
The Aztec capital, built on an island in Lake Texcoco, was one of the largest cities in the world in 1519 — Spanish chroniclers described it as more impressive than any city in Europe.
From Wikipedia
The Aztec Empire, also known as the Triple Alliance or historiographically as the Tenochca Empire but most accurately known as the Mexica, was an alliance of three Nahua city-states: Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and Tlacopan. These three city-states ruled that area in and around the Valley of Mexico from 1428 until the combined forces of the Spanish conquistadores and their native allies who ruled under Hernán Cortés defeated them in 1521. Its people and civil society are historiographically referred to as the Aztecs or the Culhua-Mexica.
Wikipedia: Aztec Empire·CC BY-SA 4.0
Borders & accuracy
Solid borders are reconstructed from canonical historical-basemap data or hand-crafted from scholarly atlases.
- SOURCEhand-crafted from scholarly atlases
- DETAILhand-traced-from:wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_Empire
- SNAPSHOT1519
- POLITY TYPEstate
Wars of this empire14
Conflicts whose belligerents name this polity, best-documented first.
- Spanish Conquest of Mexico1519–21World-changing · 3.6M dead
- World-changing · 240K dead
- Aztec Expansion1345–1500Major conflict · 500K dead
- Aztec Flower Wars1428–1521Major conflict · 200K dead
- Aztec-Tlaxcalan Wars1456–1521Major conflict · 150K dead
- Major conflict
- Aztec-Tarascan Wars1469–78Significant
- Battle of Otumba1520Significant
- Regional
- Regional
- Regional
- Regional
- Regional
- Aztec Tributary Uprisings1500–19Regional
Open in the atlas →Seeks the timeline to 1428 and fits the map to these borders.
Cite as: Aztec Empire (1428 – 1521). War Atlas. https://waratlas.org/e/aztec-empire · Sources & methodology