Pros And Cons Of The Aztecs

A century after Columbus made the Americas known to Europe, the Spaniards sent out additional ships to explore and bring back wealth and knowledge. However, Hérnan Cortés, the leader of this expedition, did not follow his mission. He first conquered a city on the coast and moved inward to continue overtaking the Aztec empire (Lecture?). The moment Cortés and his men touched the land, European diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever began decimating the Aztecs, who had never built up immunities. In addition to this, there had already been drought, causing a shortage of food and water throughout the empire. In all, this made it relatively easy for Cortés to capture the capital city of Tenochtitlan. The immune systems of the inhabitants of the Americas were completely unaccustomed to the diseases of the Old World. Thus, smallpox, a disease that the Europeans usually caught in their childhoods, wiped out up to ninety percent of the population of the Aztecs. The pestilence inhibited the Aztecs from even the smallest movement which made a great percentage of the population bedridden. This caused them to weaken, and starve due to the fact that no person could rise to get food, and those who were

The drought led to “the price of grain skyrocketing, left granaries empty and many people without water.” When the battle of Tenochtitlan began, the city was put under siege. The citizens, already starving and dying from smallpox, began to run out of food. One Aztec accounted that “there was famine, [and] many died of hunger…The water they drank was salty. Everything was eaten: lizards, swallows, maize straw, grass that grows on salt flats…and they chewed at…wood, glue flowers, plaster, leather…” Anything that could possibly be eaten, was consumed to some degree. In this way, many of the Aztec people died off without Cortés having to kill them