The Sacred Heart of Tenochtitlan
Standing in the Centro Historico today, it is hard to imagine the city that once stood on this ground over 500 years ago. Tenochtitlan amazed the conquistadors: a bustling metropolis that was one of the largest cities in the world at the time. With pyramids and royal houses built up on the shores of Lake Texcoco, the city would have been as beautiful as any they could have known from Europe.
The Aztecs, a pre-Hispanic people also known as the Mexicas, first settled in the Valley of Mexico in 1325 from where they grew into a commanding force. For 200 years, they built their imperial capital Tenochtitlan, while extracting tribute and riches from over 350 subjugated populations across a vast territory, stretching across central Mexico from coast to coast.
Tenochtitlan was the political and economic center of this empire. Situated on an island in Lake Texcoco, it was accessed either by canoe or across a network of bridges and causeways. (The lake was drained during the colonial period in an effort to control flooding and no longer exists in the area.)
With a layout based on cosmology, four roadways heading from each cardinal point led to the Ceremonial Center, where the giant pyramid of the Templo Mayor marked the city’s central point and the center of the Aztec world.
The Gods of Rain and War
The site of the Templo Mayor is of special significance to Aztec spirituality.
According to myth, the Aztecs first arrived in the Valley of Mexico following a divine vision delivered through a shaman priest. Their patron god, Huitzilopochtli, ordered his followers to depart their homeland further north and migrate to a new settlement. The location of this new homeland would be revealed by the sight of a giant eagle perched on a cactus.
After witnessing what they believed to be Huitzilopochtli in the form of an eagle on an island in Lake Texcoco, the followers decided that this was the site they had been searching for. Here, they constructed the first temple to their patron god and the city of Tenochtitlan was born.
A further legend describes how a priest dived into the lake, where he met Tlaloc, the rain god. Tlaloc confirmed to the priest permission to build their settlement on this sacred island.
Thus, the Templo Mayor was built to honor these two gods: Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the sun, and Tlaloc, the god of rain, water and fertility.
These gods symbolize fundamental values of the Aztec civilization. Conquest and extracting tribute was represented through the god of war, Huitzilopochtli. Their reliance on agriculture was depicted through the rain god, Tlaloc.
Destruction by the Conquistadors
The conquistadors were in awe of Tenochtitlan. Their accounts reveal how they met the Emperor Moctezuma on the summit of the Templo Mayor, from where they admired the city’s architecture and sweeping natural beauty along a lakeshore beneath snow-capped volcanoes.
But the conquistadors military struggle to defeat the Aztec Empire would inflict rampant destruction on the city. Temples and sculptures of gods were brought to the ground, with the rubble used to build the first houses and convents of the new colonial capital.
The conquistadors asserted their dominance through the destruction of symbols of the Aztec religion. The Templo Mayor, given its centrality to Aztec cosmology, was destroyed.
The land above the temple was used to build homes for the conquistador captains and government buildings for the colonial administration. In a bid to instill Roman Catholicism in the new colony, much of the land occupied by the Templo Mayor was set aside for the construction of a church that would later become the Metropolitan Cathedral.
Discovery in the 20th Century
In the centuries that followed the Spanish defeat of the Aztec Empire, Mexico City grew into a modern metropolis above the ruins of Tenochtitlan.
Despite a number of remarkable archeological discoveries in the Zocalo area, most notably the 24-tonne Piedra del Sol (Sun Stone) uncovered in 1790 and now on display in the National Museum of Anthropology, the difficulty of exploring below ground in Mexico City’s center meant that a full excavation was not attempted until 1978.
When electrical workers installing an underground cable uncovered a hard stone about two meters below the concrete, archaeologists were called in. They discovered that the stone was, in fact, a 3 meter wide monolith of the Aztec god Coyolxauhqui (the moon goddess and sister of Huitzilopochtli).
Recognizing the significance of this find so close to the Zocalo, Mexico’s president initiated a multi-year project to excavate the area and reveal the ruins of the Templo Mayor. The project faced a number of challenges to excavate such a large site in the center of Mexico’s capital, including the controversial demolition of 13 buildings.
But the spectacular revealing of the temple garnered worldwide attention. The presidents of the USA and France, numerous celebrities and visitors from across the world descended on the Centro Historico to bear witness to the last remnants of the Aztec Empire.