2 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
of Tetzcoco. These leaders founded their island city on this
spot and gave it the name Tenochtitlan, a name drawn from
the topography of the site of this miraculous event. Thus
the name is not just a descriptive toponym but the loca-
tion where Huitzilopochtli, a powerful warrior deity, chose
Tenochtitlan as the island home for the Mexica, confirming
their sense of themselves as his chosen people.
But this name, central to the history of the Mexica city
from its foundation, was erased by the name of the city
that was founded upon it after its conquest in 1519–1521.
When the Spanish-born Bernardo de Balbuena pub-
lished his well-known epic poem about the city in 1604,
he called it “la famosa Ciudad de México” (the famous city
of Mexico) and made no mention of Tenochtitlan. 6 The
city Balbuena wrote about seemed to have little connection
to its Aztec forebear. It stood at the pivot of a new, now
global, empire. It was home to the viceroy of New Spain,
second only in power to the Habsburg king himself, and
was the hub of a vast trading network that threaded out to
ports in Antwerp and Seville and reached as far as China.
Because of these networks, Chinese merchants would pay
their debts with silver coins minted in Bolivia, natives in
the Valley of Mexico would plant grafted peaches from
Spain, and courtiers in Nuremberg would decorate their
salons with Japanese folding screens. The American center
of this empire was Mexico City’s great Plaza Mayor, one
of the largest urban plazas in the world, dominated by the
red-roofed Parián, a market named after the one in Manila,
another Habsburg domain. In Mexico City’s Parián, one
could buy silk and porcelain from China, wool from Spain,
and wines from Portugal.
A painting created at the end of the seventeenth century
captures, in both form and format, the early global empire
that Balbuena had known some two or three generations
earlier (figure 1.2). This work is a biombo, a Japanese-
inspired folding screen popular among painters and their
patrons in Mexico City, who encountered such Asian
works firsthand because of the brisk transpacific traffic of
goods on the Spanish fleet known as the Manila galleon. It
is an eight-paneled work (perhaps two central panels are
missing, which would originally have made a screen of ten
panels), and the five panels on the right show us the eastern
side of the Plaza Mayor with the palace where the viceroy
lived as its backdrop, one of the many such nodes of royal
power across the empire. Its architecture was comparable
to other Habsburg seats built in the seventeenth century, a
reminder of the centralizing pull that Spain exerted on its
far-flung domains. A carriage approaches the door of the
palace, as black-garbed courtiers watch from second-story
windows at the approach of the viceroy; golden clouds,
inspired by Japanese works, float lazily over the surface of
the scene. 7 In this pictorial space, the world of indigenous
Tenochtitlan has vanished.
The death of Tenochtitlan and, with it, the destructionfiguRe 1.2. Unknown creator, Biombo Portraying a View of the
Palace of the Viceroy in Mexico City, late seventeenth century. Museo
de América, Madrid.