The Aztec & Inca Empires

The lake was the obvious problem. Lakes are for fishing, not for capital cities. Yet the Mexica — the people Europeans would later call Aztecs — chose an uninhabited swampy island in the middle of Lake Texcoco and turned it into the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the largest anywhere on earth.

Walking into Tenochtitlán from the southern causeway, a visitor would have seen the Great Temple complex rising above the city center. The Aztec Empire — or more precisely, the Triple Alliance — poured enormous resources into this dual-pyramid structure dedicated to Huitzilopochtli (god of the sun and war) and Tlaloc (god of rain and agriculture). The building was reconstructed at least seven times, each new layer encasing the previous one, growing larger with each successive ruler.

The temple was not merely a religious site. It was a political statement. Every major military victory was marked by a dedication ceremony at the Great Temple, often involving the sacrifice of war captives in numbers that shocked later observers. The exact scale of Aztec sacrifice has been debated extensively — Spanish sources almost certainly inflated the numbers for propaganda purposes — but sacrifice was undeniably central to Aztec cosmology.