=The Aztecs=
-What- -Happened-
What Happened?
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The Aztecs were the most powerful group in the world at their time, they built great structures and works of art that still stand today. So what happened? Why aren’t they still such a powerful nation today. The truth is that a powerful Spaniard named Cortez set sail to Mexico with nearly seven hundred Spanish soldiers complete with their armor swords and spears. Almost immediately after their arrival in Mexico they discovered the Aztec peoples. A great nation no other Europeans had yet met.
Now the time of Colonel Cortez and his army’s arrival happened to fall around the time that the Aztecs believed one of their gods to return. A great dispute came upon the Aztec peoples. Was this Colonel Cortez and his men the returning gods of legend, or were they merely invaders from a far off land beyond the sea. Many of the Aztec people believed that colonel Cortez was a god, and the emperor of the Aztecs was one of them. Fearing the wrath of the gods the emperor decided to invite the Colonel and his men to his palace at the center of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. After witnessing the Aztec’s great riches including gold silver and turquoise Colonel Cortez decided to conquer the great Aztec empire. Upon announcing this to his men some soldiers disapproved of this. So to give his men no other option Colonel Cortez had his ships burned and destroyed. Now there was no going back. Colonel Cortez’s plan was simple yet genius, to accept the emperors offer to come to his palace with his seven hundred men and once their. He would take the emperor and the royal palace captive as they pillaged the great city for treasures. For the most part the Colonel’s plan worked, but soon after holding the emperor and his palace prisoner the Aztec peoples begun to rebel against their invaders and begun to fight back. Great battles between the armor covered Spanish and the animal skin coated Aztec were fought in the streets. When Spanish soldiers began dying the Colonel ordered that the emperor be shown to the people via his balcony and that the Emperor demand his people to stop attacking the Spanish soldiers. The emperor was forced to do as he was told, but when the emperor went out onto the balcony and addressed the people to end their attacks on the Spanish invaders, the Aztec people turned on him and stoned him to death. Now trapped at the very center of the great Aztec city surrounded by the ever-angry Aztec people with no upper hand the Spanish were trapped.
On a dark, quiet, and moonless night. The Spanish moved out of their palace and into the streets carrying all the riches they could in the hopes of escaping the city undetected. They had almost reached the end of the city’s walls when they were very suddenly spotted and attack with the full force of the Aztec peoples. As they tried to cross the final river nearly half of the Spanish soldiers were hit in to the water were they were dragged down by their armor and riches until they died of drowning. The bodies of the drowned Spanish soldiers nearly filled the river. Colonel Cortez and a much less amount of soldiers barely managed to escape the Aztec city alive. Days after driving out the Spanish invaders a disease spread across the Aztec people killing over half of them. This disease carried over by the Spanish was smallpox. Seeing that smallpox had wiped out most of the Aztec warriors Colonel Cortez decided to attack The Aztec Empire yet again. But the colonel had a problem he didn’t have enough remaining men to engage the Aztec again. So to give himself the upper hand the colonel and the Spanish sided with the Tlaxcaltecas [a large group of people that the Aztec’s had again and again failed to conquer] to attack and defeat the Aztec Empire. This time the battle was much more basic as the Spanish and the Tlaxcaltecas fought their way into the city. The battle between the Spanish/Tlaxcaltecas and the Aztec lasted six weeks before the Spanish/Tlaxcaltecas conquered the Aztec empire, destroying it forever.