simply as a record of the Aztec wanderings in the valley of Mexico and its vicinity. Whatever their origin, by their fierce and warlike nature and bloody religious rites, from the first they made themselves the pests of Anáhuac, and later its tyrants. For some centuries they acquired no national influence, but were often conquered, enslaved, and driven from place to place, until early in the fourteenth century, when Mexico or Tenochtitlan was founded, and under a line of able warlike kings started forward in its career of prosperity unequaled in the annals of aboriginal America. At the fall of Culhuacan, Mexico ranked next to Tezcuco and Azcapuzalco, and when the armies of the latter prevailed against the former, Mexico was the most powerful of all the nations that sprang to arms, and pressed forward to humble the Tepanec tyrant, to reïnstate the Acolhua monarch on his throne, and to restore Tezcuco to her former commanding position. The result was the utter defeat of the Tepanecs, and the glory of Azcapuzalco departed forever.
THE AZTEC ERA.
Thus ended in the early part of the fifteenth century the Chichimec empire,—that is, it nominally ended, for the Chichimec kings proper lost nothing of their power,—and, by the establishment of the confederacy already described, the Aztec empire was inaugurated. Under the new dispensation of affairs, Mexico, by whose aid chiefly Azcapuzalco had been humbled, received rank and dominion at least equal to that of Tezcuco, while from motives of policy, and in order, so far as possible, to conciliate the good will of a strong though conquered people, Tlacopan, under a branch of the Tepanecs, with a less extensive domain, was admitted to the alliance. The terms of the confederacy seem, as I have said, never to have been openly violated; but in the first years of the sixteenth century the Aztecs had not only excited the hatred of the most powerful nations outside the bounds of Anáhuac by their foreign raids, but by their arrogant overbearing spirit had made themselves obnoxious
