Events in the Conquest of Mexico

One of the most significant events in the Conquest of Mexico by Fernando ( Hernán) Cortés's expedition involved the founding of a city. Upon arriving on the coast of Mexico, the leaders of the expedition declared in a solemn document that they were founding the city of Veracruz and that this new city's council had chosen Cortés as its leader. The municipality then dispatched a couple of well-connected representatives to the royal court in Spain to secure acceptance of their actions. These steps asserted the expedition's juridical separation from the control of the governor of Cuba, who initially had authorized and dispatched the fleet to this unexplored territory. By constituting themselves as a municipality, the expeditionaries had formed themselves into the essential Iberian political unit. Further, nothing would be more immediately recognizable to the royal government than a petition by a municipality presenting a dispute with another governmental agency, in this case the governor of Cuba.

Of course, the peoples of central Mexico enjoyed an urban tradition of their own that dated back thousands of years, with some urban complexes having populations in the tens of thousands—and in a few exceptional cases, in the hundreds of thousands. The great island city of Tenochtitlan contained a population of around 200,000 when the Spaniards arrived. But the devastation of the Conquest, which took well over two years and whose success required the leveling of the Mexica (Aztec) capital, combined with the horrendous demographic collapse of the indigenous population to destroy the largest Indian urban centers.

Those urban centers that survived the Conquest period physically intact only contained a fraction of their pre-Contact population within a generation or two after the encounter. But the Spaniards respected indigenous civil governance, and native councils continued to rule their communities. The Tlaxcalan municipal council carefully recorded its proceedings in written Nahuatl beginning only 20 years after the Spanish Conquest. Numerous other native councils did the same.

Throughout Mexico, Spaniards commonly established their communities as new cities on unoccupied sites, sometimes just a few miles away from an extant indigenous community. Puebla was founded in 1531 within easy reach of Cholula, but was still quite distinct from it. Antequera emerged as a new community in 1529 in the densely populated Oaxaca Valley, assuming the site of a former Mexica fortress rather than any of the nearby native settlements. On the Yucatán Peninsula, Mérida was raised well apart from the numerous sites. In Michoacán, the provincial capital was situated first at the traditional native centers of Tzintzuntzan and Pátzcuaro, but before the end of the sixteenth century, the Spaniards there established a new capital, Valladolid (which was renamed Morelia in 1826), somewhat away from any Indian community. Although these cities did not build upon preexisting Indian settlements, quite soon after their establishment they were ringed by outlying neighborhoods of indigenous peoples drawn by the economic promise of these commercial and administrative centers.