inTRoducTion • 9Moteuczoma’s death were clearly not so convinced. They
show in a work like the Codex Aubin that the city is not
embodied by its ruler and thus cannot simply arrive at a
mortal end, no matter how much the Mexica rulers them-
selves would have liked to convince their people of this
point. Instead, the flow of history across the pages of the
Codex Aubin, one that seems not to proclaim the city’s
death, compels us to locate the city elsewhere, beyond its
ruling elite.
LocaTing The ciTy
In the case of Tenochtitlan, Cortés describes the city as
“destroyed and razed to the ground,” and it would be fair
to equate total physical destruction with the city’s death,
if we were to understand the city as coterminous with
the built environment. Ironically, Cortés probably did not
understand the city as this; to him, as to other Spaniards of
his era, the city was both a physical entity and a collection
of citizens. 13 However, Cortés’s immediate circumstances,
most of all his aspirations to consolidate Spanish politi-
cal control of territory, made it expedient to claim that
Tenochtitlan had been destroyed, and with it, indigenous
political power. His claim is echoed by traditional archi-
tectural history, with its focus on the built environment,
and within its terms, the erasure of a city’s built environ-
ment is its death. The death of Tenochtitlan, along with
other indigenous cities, as measured by its built forms,
figures in many conventional histories of Mexico’s built
environment, which posit its destruction or nonexistence.
Consider Robert Mullen’s architectural history of the vice-
regal period, in which he writes, “Soon after the Conquest,
however, the need for both civil and religious architecture
became imperative as new cities were founded and native
communities were urbanized. . . . Administrative centers,
schools, hospitals, water supplies, defenses and above all,
churches were needed where none had ever existed” (italics
mine). 14 While Mullen’s claim is true for a newly founded
city like Puebla, most of the post-Conquest cities in the
population-dense Valley of Mexico had deep temporal
roots, continuing to employ long-established transport
networks, aquatic infrastructure, and building technologies
after the Conquest, as they had done before; most changes
that resulted from the Conquest were registered in monu-
mental architecture alone. In other words, cities endured.
The question of just how much of the built environment
of Tenochtitlan survived in the wake of the Conquest will
be explored in the following chapters, but using destroyed
temples—pre-Hispanic monumental architecture—as an
index of the city’s death is, I think, as limiting as equating
the death of a ruler with the death of a city. So how should
we think of the city?
If we turn to an early page of the Codex Aubin, which
offers a history of the city seen from the bottom up, unlike
its top-down counterpart, the Codex Mendoza, and look at
the page that marks the beginning of a new fifty-two-year
period in the year 2 Reed, the glyph in the upper right, we
see one way the Mexica thought of cities (figure 1.7). Here,
we see the green bell-shaped hill (tepetl), and streaming
from it is a flow of blue water (atl); at the top is the grass-
hopper (chapolin) that serves as a logograph for the place
named Chapultepec, where the Mexica once lived. And
below is a shield and club, the necessary instruments for
Mexica expansion. Like other Nahuatl-speaking peoplesfiguRe 1.7. Unknown creator, the arrival at Chapultepec, Codex
Aubin, fol. 19r, ca. 1576–1608. © Trustees of the British Museum.