Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

In 1570, there may still have been as many as sixty thousand Indian people in the city, but their resources were depleted after the tax law changes of the 1560s, leaving them more vulnerable than they had been. Then in 1576/77 a horrifying epidemic struck. Hemorrhagic smallpox caused people to bleed from all the orifices, even the eyes, and in its wake, other diseases spread rampantly in the weakened population. “There were deaths all over New Spain,” Chimalpahin later wrote. “We Indians died, together with the blacks, but only a few Spaniards died.”9 The epidemic was followed by others. By 1610, there were only about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand indigenous left in what once had been Tenochtitlan.10 In short, the majority of the city’s people were no longer indigenous.