Smallpox was only just the beginning. Over the next few decades, the indigenous people of Mesoamerica were afflicted by deadly epidemics again and again. Measles arrived in the early 1530s. A disease the Mexica referred to as cocoliztli (from the Nahuatl word for “pestilence”) killed up to 80 percent of the region’s inhabitants in 1545, making it the deadliest epidemic in recorded history.[21] It returned again between 1576 and 1578.
