The Aztecs, who created a vast empire in the heart of the Valley of Mexico, were among the newly evolving nations in the Americas after the Mayan collapse. They called themselves the People of the Sun. And they told a sacred story about their origins in a mysterious homeland in northern Mexico.

The People of the Sun heard the voice of a bird that spoke to them from a tree, saying: " Tibui ... Let us go. I will call you Mexica- :a and I will lead you to a promised land where you will be great among all the tribes."

The Mexica left their land in the desolate place north of the Colorado River and followed the voice of the bird, taking up their tribal god Huitzilopochtli and carrying him on a throne of rushes into the wilderness in search of a new homeland.
 Their god said to them: "I shall lead you to the place you seek. There you shall build a temple which will be my house, my bed of grass. And in that same place you shall make your homes. And you shall conquer and rule all the land. And your mighty city shall be called Tenochtitilan, and you shall be the People of the Sun."

 This ancient tale of the search for a homeland comes from the folk history of the Aztec (or Mexica) people. The story is an account of some actual events that took place in the years between 160 and 1325, when the once humble Aztecs founded the last of several powerful empires that ruled the vast Mexican territories in North and Central America.

Standing at the center of this mighty domain was the imperial city, Tenochtitilan. Among the grand temples and pyramids of this great Mexican city, more than three hundred thousand people made their way along broad streets and avenues lined with sixty thousand houses. In 1492 this lavish Mexican capital was five times bigger than the city the European invaders called London.  It had vastly superior plumbing, a far greater and more varied agricultural harvest, verwhelming wealth, and far less poverty and disease. Taking full advantage of the great legacy of the lost civlizations that both outshone and greatly predated them in the valley of Mexico, the Aztecs borrowed other people's religions; they claimed other nations' histories; and they imitated the masterful arts and philosophies that originated among long-vanished nations such as the Olmecs, the Toltecs, and the Maya. They took over the cultures of the peoples they overran, and they rewrote history in order to make themselves the heroes of other people's sacred stories.

For example, the Aztecs took on the ideology that there should be strong social stratification in their empire.  They sent missionaries out to convert the peoples they conquered to see the world from the Aztec-conqueror perspective.  The Aztecs also expanded the common element of blood sacrifice in the Meso American religions to sacrifice thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands, of war captives to their god.  The sacrifices included ripping out the heart of the live but drugged captive usually in front of the nobility of surrounding areas that had come under Aztec control.  Some historians theorize that since the Aztecs started out as mercenaries for their neighbors they had to constantly use terror as a method to keep their subject peoples from revolting as they had done to the Tepanec patrons who used the Aztecs as mercenaries.

Adapted from The World in 1492 by Jean Fritz et al. New York:  Henry Holt and Company, 1992.