Hernán Cortes, in his Five Letters of Relation, describes his entry into the Puebla Valley, where he finds the cities of Cholula and Tlaxcala. It is in Tlaxcala that Cortes finds allies willing to fight alongside him against Montezuma in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. Cortes estimates the population of Tlaxcala at 150,000. “In this city there is a market,” he reports to Charles V, “with more than 30,000 people busy buying and selling.” “The administrative system,” Cortes continues, “resembles that of Venice, Genoa, Pisa, since there is no supreme lord.” We are witnessing one of the turning points in the history of the modern world: the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, which will lay the foundation for subsequent European conquests in the Americas. Fewer than a thousand Spaniards succeed in the enterprise, not only due to the diseases they inadvertently brought with them and their weapons and horses, but also and above all due to the allies they found there. The Tlaxcaltecs and their Otomi warrior units wanted to settle old scores with the Aztecs. The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, and the city-state of Tlaxcala embodied opposing ideals (much like Athens and Sparta in the Mediterranean). In Tlaxcala, for example, experiments in social welfare, a practice begun a thousand years earlier in Teotihuacan, were taking place, while it was Aztec Tenochtitlan that broke with local tradition and created a rapacious empire, more similar to European states.
