the origin of their defeat, because when the spaniards arrived in the year that the prophecy predicted the return of Quetzalcoatl, and that Hernán Cortés skillfully exploited, assuming himself as captain of the expected personage. Almost everyone in the Anahuac world turned against those that one hundred years before, had violated millennial humanistic thought. The mexica themselves, many years before the arrival of the conquistadors and under a Tlacaelel initiative, sent messengers to the mythical place of origin, and returned to tell Moctezuma I, that he was threatening the Huitzilopochtli power.
"And of the main complaints that Coatlicue had of her son Huitzilopochtli, and how she expected it and what she said, that after some time, he should be thrown from that land and that he had to return, because by the same order that he had to hold nations, by the same order they would be taken away and removed the domain and lordship he had over them". (Fray Diego Durán)
All paid a very expensive price for their mistakes. The aztecs for transgressors and imperialists, and the people who fought with the spaniards against them; because at the end of the war they realized the spaniards were not Quetzalcoatl envoys and turned out to be more exploitative and sanguinary than the mexicas.
The "famous" aztec empire did not last but 196 years, since the founding of Tenochtitlan in 1325, until its destruction in 1521. The most important ancient Mexico period was the Classical, between 200 BCE and 850 CE; the representative culture was Toltecs and the center of this impressive cultural development was Teotihuacan. The mexicas arrived in the Anahuac Valley in times of decadence, when the Toltec masters had been gone for centuries and Teotihuacan was only a series of mounds covered by dirt, weed and oblivion. The famous "aztec empire" was limited barely had 81 years of power and splendor. It is surprising how official history -from colonial times- has tried to make mexicans lose their historical memory and make them believe that their "distant past", is a culture such as the mexica, which was characterized as: imperialists, centralist, transgressors of philosophy, ideology, religion and ethical and moral
 | This page was originally published in Spanish, and is translated by Wikisource editors. It does not use the proofread page system traditionally; it is used to verify translation. Proofreading and validation must be done by editors who are fluent in both the original and the translated language. Follow the interwiki link under In other languages to view this page in Spanish. |  |
