By the end of the next century, it would be the capital of an empire, a “shimmering, aquatic world” of gardens, canals, aqueducts, orderly streets and causeways, a grand palace and a pyramid at the centre of the city, schools for all their children, markets stocked with sumptuous luxuries and all the necessities required by the island city’s 50,000 inhabitants, a population comparable to London’s or Seville’s. Sometime in the mid-1300s, they settled on a marshy island in the middle of a lake and built a town called Tenochtitlan. The Mexica, one of many Nahuatl-speaking peoples who migrated south from the deserts of what is now the American south-west into the fertile central valley of Mexico, were relative latecomers, arriving after most of the good land was taken.

“In the annals,” she writes, “we can hear the Aztecs talking. They allow Townsend – who has been championing, translating and publishing the annals for more than a decade – to synthesise a history of the Aztecs that relies primarily on their own words. Photograph: De Agostini/A Dagli Orti/Getty ImagesĪnother body of sources survives, the neglected Nahuatl-language texts known as the annals, written in the years following the conquest by men Townsend describes as “indigenous intellectuals” eager to record their experiences in their own tongue for their own people, to preserve their history before it faded from collective memory. Hernán Cortés – mistaken for a god by Moctezuma. Moctezuma, the story goes, mistook Cortés for a god whose return had long been prophesied, and surrendered his empire without a fight.

They would later be remembered mainly through images of hearts torn from living bodies with obsidian blades and corpses tumbling down bloody-stepped pyramids, as a people ruled by ritualised bloodlust, trapped in a rigid fatalism, easily conquered by more agile newcomers from across the sea. The awe with which Europeans at first beheld the civilisation of the people who would be known as the Aztecs – they called themselves the Mexica – would not last long. “All the days of my life,” he wrote, “I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things.” In his diary, Dürer enthused about a golden sun “a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size”, plus “all kinds of wonderful objects”. I n the summer of 1520, the artist Albrecht Dürer viewed a sampling of the treasures the conquistador Hernán Cortés had recently shipped to Europe from the land that would later be called Mexico.

Aztec autumn book