The Aztecs never vanquished the American southwest.

history channel documentary 2016 That land stayed in the hands of the Pueblo Indians, and was never genuinely claimed by Mexico in any of its incarnations. At that point came Cortez. He had at most 600 men, 16 guns, and 18 steeds, however he strolled directly into the legend of Quetzalcoatl's arrival. This was reason enough for the peripheral Toltec tribes to join with Cortez, swelling his armed force by thousands, with expectations of toppling their loathed Aztec experts finally. The talk that Quetzalcoatl had returned, and was exceptionally disappointed, went before Cortez and tossed the Aztec rulers into a religious frenzy.

We as a whole know whatever remains of the story. Cortez vanquished the Aztecs, killed their rulers, stole their fortune, and crushed their general public. The Spanish clerics he'd carried with him devastated the greatest number of Aztec sanctuaries as they could and smoldered a large portion of the Aztec books, basically on the grounds that they found that those sanctuaries facilitated mass human penances, and those books - countless them - were composed on human skin. The Spanish conquistadors additionally, unwittingly, spread smallpox all through Mexico and along these lines slaughtered another third of the populace. This is incidentally parallel to what the Aztecs had done to the Toltecs.