The Aztec settled in the central valley approximately 800 years ago. In the beginning, they acted as mercenaries and were vassal local sovereigns like Cozcoxtli, Masters of the city-State of culhuacan. With time, their power increased and they founded their own city in a place chosen by Huitzilopochtli, their feeder god. The Aztèque capital was founded in achievement of the prophecy of the god. This one wished the construction of the city at the place where one would see an eagle devouring a snake on a cactus pushing on a rock, in the middle of a lake. Thus in 1345 Tenochtitlan the day lives. The city was going to end up becoming this large metropolis formed today by Mexico City.

The Aztec capital was from any extraordinary point of view. Built on an island in the middle of a big lake, it was connected to the dry land by roadways. Providing fresh water in abundance, the lake was used for goods transport and represented an excellent source of food. The Aztec ones utiliséaient this one for their culture by laying out the fertile ground of its bed on wooden carpentries, thus forming floating gardens.

The Aztec ones reigned by the means of a severe hierarchy. The sovereign had of account to return only in Huitzilopochtli. Its word had value of law and it was treated in half god. To assist it, a class of noble in load of the businesses of the State was equipped in reward with a considerable richness and a capacity. The nobility had a statute equivalent to that of the priests, representatives of the gods and persons in charge of the ritual monks, writing, medicine and astronomy. Then came the traders, the tradesmen, the craftsmen and other simple subjects. The level low was occupied by the slaves, either of the prisoners captured at the time of a battle and awaiting their sacrificial death, or of the people having taken the state of slave of their own boss, in payment of a debt or to survive a bad harvest.
The Aztec ones thrived and took the control of all the central valley. Under the reign of the emperor Moctezuma Ier, the empire still widens and even the mountainous barrier of the valley could not contain its power. The warlike state of Aztec the engageâ then in military campaigns with long distance to extend until Oaxaca in the south and with Veracruz in the east.

In the center of Tenochtitlan drew up the pyramid of Huitzilopochtli, where in an always started again sacrifice, human hearts were torn off with alive victims before being offered to the god. With the image of the Maya world, blood was cement of the Aztec universe. Huitzilopochtli was at the same time the god of the War and of Sun-Raising, and the Aztec believed that the human sacrifices guaranteed to them the victory as well as the daily appearance of the solar star and the maintenance of the universe.

The Aztec empire knew a new spectacular extension under the reign of Moctezuma L. With its apogee, the territory thus covered a surface of 150.000 km ².
In 1519, a small fleet led by Hernan Cortes, captain with the ambitions out it common, was going to change for always the face of Mexico by ringing the knell of civilizations précolombiennes.
The Aztec were not the only ones with being touched by the arrival of Spanish. One considers at 25 million the number of Indians living in the area at the beginning of the conquest. At the end of one century, there remained nothing any more but three million about it. The others had been killed in the battles or had been decimated by the introduction of diseases as the variola against which they were not immunized.