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The Templo Mayor burning at the center of the lake city. Its platform was quarried for the cathedral that stands on the spot.

When the Spaniards first walked the causeway into Tenochtitlan in 1519, the soldier Bernal Díaz wrote that some of them asked aloud whether it was a dream: a city of perhaps a quarter million people standing in the middle of a lake, bigger than Seville, bigger than Rome as far as any of them knew, fed by floating gardens and drinking from a stone aqueduct that ran in from the springs at Chapultepec. Two years later they destroyed it house by house, and the strangest part of the story is how few of them there were. Cortés never commanded more than about 1,500 Spaniards; the army that took the city was tens of thousands of Tlaxcalans and other subject peoples of the Aztec empire, settling a century of tribute and flower wars. The conquest of Mexico was, in manpower, an Indian civil war with Spanish officers and Spanish steel. The siege of 1521 was an engineering solution to an amphibious problem. After the catastrophe of the Noche Triste, when half the Spanish force drowned in the lake retreating under gold they would not drop, Cortés had thirteen small warships built inland, carried in pieces over the mountains, and launched on the lake. The brigantines swept the war canoes, the causeways were cut, and the aqueduct from Chapultepec was broken at its source. What artillery could not do, thirst and famine did, and behind them moved the third army: the smallpox that had arrived with a sick soldier the year before and had already killed the emperor Cuitláhuac and, by some reckonings, two of every five people in the valley. On 13 August 1521, after 75 days as its own historians count them, the last emperor, Cuauhtémoc, was taken on the lake in a canoe, trying to reach the mainland to continue the war. He asked Cortés for the knife at his belt, to be killed as a king; he got four more years as a hostage and a hanging in a rainforest instead. The city was leveled, the temple platform quarried for a cathedral, the canals filled, and over three centuries the lake itself was drained away, so that the only city on earth the conquistadors compared to enchantment is now the dry ground under Mexico City's traffic. The painting is one of a series made in Mexico itself 150 years later, for wealthy criollo patrons who wanted the founding epic on their walls: brigantines and war canoes, the causeway battles, the great pyramid in flames, all happening at once in the manner of the indigenous painted histories the artists half remembered. In the corner a numbered key identifies the captains, like a school diagram of the end of a world.