East their coming was hailed
as the return of Quetzalcoatl, and the reverence and superstition
surrounding these supposed "children of the sun" protected the
Spaniards and permitted their advance into the country, and indeed, was
at length conducive to the downfall of Montezuma and the Aztec Empire.

So pass the cultured, shadowy Toltecs from our vision. They had been
preceded in their southward migration by the Otomies, in the seventh
century A.D., an exceedingly numerous and primitive people who almost
annihilated the Spaniards during the Conquest, and whose descendants
to-day occupy a vast region, and still largely speak their own
language, rather than Spanish. The Toltecs were succeeded by yet
another tribe "from the north," the Chichemecas, who came down and
occupied their civilisation of Tula. These people, warlike and inferior
in culture to the Toltecs, allied themselves with the neighbouring
Nahua tribes, and an empire came into being, with its capital at
Texcoco, on the shore of the great lake. The famous Nezahualcoyotl, the
poet-king of this empire, who ascended the throne of Texcoco in 1431,
was one of the most remarkable figures of prehistoric Anahuac, and his
genius and fortunes recall the history of Alfred of England, to the
student's mind. He built a splendid palace at Texcotzinco, and ruins of
its walls and aqueducts remain to this day. His life is sketched in
these pages subsequently, and something of the beauty of his philosophy
set forth.

And thus history has brought us again to the Aztecs, the founders of
Tenochtitlan by the lake-shore, on the spot indicated by their oracle.
They had come "from the north," one of seven tribes or families, all of
which spoke the Nahuatl or Mexican tongue. This unknown country, called
Astlan, or "the land of the herons," was the home of these seven
tribes--the Mexicas, or Aztecs, the Tlascalans, Xochimilcas, Tepanecas,
Colhuas, Chalcas and Tlahincas--and has been varyingly assigned a
locality in California, and in Sinaloa. Why the Aztecs left their
northern home is not known, even in legend, but they were instigated to
their wanderings, tradition says, by their fabled war-god,
Huitzilopochtli, or Mexitl, from whom came the name "Mexica" or
"Azteca," by which these people called themselves. From the beginning
of the tenth to the beginning of the thirteenth century A.D. this tribe
journeyed and sojourned on its southward way, from valley to valley,
from lake to lake,