ed, was in power at the time of the conquest by
the Spaniards, but he hated the Aztecs with a bitter hatred in
consequence of their influence upon his people, and the installing by
the machinations of Montezuma of an elder brother upon the throne,
which had plunged the kingdom into civil war. This was in the second
decade of the sixteenth century.

The Texcocans, in conjunction with yet another and smaller people
living on the west side of the lake at Tlacopan, formed with the Aztecs
a confederation or triple alliance of three republics, by which they
agreed to stand together against all comers, and to divide all
territory and results of conquest in agreed proportion. They carried on
war and annexation around them for a considerable period, extending
their sway far beyond the Valley of Mexico, or Anahuac, which formed
their home, passing the Sierra Madre mountains to the east, until about
the middle of the fifteenth century--under Montezuma--the land and
tribes acknowledging their sway reached to the shores of the Gulf of
Mexico. To the south their arms and influence penetrated into what are
now Guatemala and Nicaragua, whilst to the west they exercised
sovereignty to the shores of the Pacific.

[Illustration: THE LAND OF THE AZTEC CONQUEST: MAIZE FIELDS NEAR
ESPERANZA, STATE OF PUEBLA.]

These conquered territories were not necessarily of easy subjugation.
On the contrary, they were plentifully inhabited by races of
warrior-peoples, many of them with strong and semi-civilised social and
military organisations. The analogy between this confederation of the
Aztecs and the extending area of their dominion and civilisation, and
the Incas of the Titicaca plateau of Peru, surrounded on all sides by
savage warlike tribes, presents itself to the observer in this as in
other respects. Like the Incas, the Aztec emperors[7] returned from
campaign after campaign loaded with trophies and embarrassed with
strings of captives from the vanquished peoples who had dared oppose
this powerful confederation. The rich tropical regions of both the
eastern and western slopes of the tableland of Anahuac thus paid
tribute to the Aztecs, as well as the boundless resources of the south.

[Footnote 7: Both these nations have been likened to the Romans in this
respect.]

But not all the nations of Anahuac fell under the dominion of the
Aztecs. Far from it. The spirits of the people of Tlascala would rise
from their graves and protest against