Moctezuma the Second

Emperor Moctezuma II, the tall, thin 40 year old ruler of the known world, walked out of the Calmecac after addressing the newly graduating priests on the history and the future of the Empire. He smiled as he looked at the horizon. Things really could not be better for him and his Mexica people, he reflected.
Today the empire was nearly a thousand miles squared, easily the largest empire in existence. The vivid colors of the 4500 square yard sacred precinct, nursed by the serpents etched on the surrounding walls, stared back at him in majesty, further enhanced by the sun’s twilight rays. The skull rack at the base of the Twin temples, dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, the God of rain, silently sang tales of Aztec conquests. Huitzilopochtli could look down upon the sacred precinct and see his sister and enemy Coyolxauhqui’s dismembered body, the blood of the new sacrificial victims from the temples flowing on her image in order to provide him with an approximation of her appearance after he avenged the death of mother Coatlicue. This commemoration soothed and focused Huitzilopochtli’s anger so he will continue to bless all the Aztec’s endeavors in war.
For Coyolxauhqui had led her four hundred siblings to kill mother Coatlicue after she bore two more children, Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl, with the plan to kill them as well once he had done murdering her own mother. She never expected Huitzilopochtli to come out of his dead mother’s womb, fully armed and ready for battle, as a God of war surely would. Huitzilopochtli then killed and dismembered his sister Coyolxauhqui. Later on Huitzilopochtli would have a son, who rebelled and had to be killed, his heart thrown in a lagoon.
Generations later, Huitzilopochtli ordered the Nahuatl priests to search for the heart and build a city over it. As a sign of where to find it, he told him there would be an eagle perched on a cactus, devouring a serpent. After finding it in an islet in the middle of lake Texcoco, they founded their city on the lake. With the God of Rain and the God of War behind them, nobody could stop them.
Long gone were the days of them scraping an existence in a tiny rock in the middle of lake Texcoco, like they had done under Tlatoani Tenoch, the founder of Tenochtitlan. Acamapichtli, Tenoch’s successor, had been clever in marrying the daughters of the neighboring tribes - which stopped the persecution they suffered at their hands - and by extending the Chinampa system to essentially will a city out of the water. The natural moat provided by the lake made invasion difficult so they needed less people to garrison the city, and the alliances, started under Acamapichtli himself, provided everything that couldn’t be grown or created inside the city. But they were still under the umbrella of Azcapotzalco, and the people were poor and made to wear maguey clothing as a sign of lower caste. And if they had a natural moat, it didn’t seem to stop the powerful Azapotzalcans from invading and pillaging.
His son, Huitzihuitl, married the daughter of Azcapotzalco’s tlatoani[^cf4] to try to obtain better conditions. Didn’t really do him any good, all those fights with his father in law ended up in open warfare anyway. But hey, at least the people could dress in cotton then, and they did end up ruling Texcoco out of that sad affair.
The next ruler was Chimalpopoca. Poor sod only lasted 10 years, having been captured in war and taken to Azcapotzalco. His spirit couldn’t stand the ridicule and starvation that he endured, so he killed himself. Didn’t those savages know that the civilized way to end the life of a warrior is by sacrificing him to the Gods? But he did benefit the empire by introducing a separation of temple life and state, which brought the federalism needed for such a large population.
But grandfather Izcoatl was Moctezuma’s personal favorite. After Chimalpopoca’s death he continued the war and eventually defeated the hated Azcapotzalcans, turning them into a client state, and burning all the historical codices in order to rewrite them for good measure. To avoid other possible future security problems, he created the Aztec Triple alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan. So what if Tlacopan was tiny? They were powerful, and inviting them to share into the alliance had defanged them. Today Tlacopan was barely a suburb. With the core territory finally safe and under the grip of a Mexica Huey Tlatoani[^cf5], all Aztecs - Mexica, Texcocan and Tlacopan, were free to start expanding the empire.
His father, Moctezuma I, was the first great conqueror. The Huastecs fell, then the Totonacs. That was the beginning of the fabulous new wealth. Rubber, Cocoa, Cotton, Fruit and Seashells, and of course the very exclusive Quetzal feathers[^cf6]. And it was nice to have all that silver and gold[^cf7] to adorn the body.
His own campaign against the Zapotecs had been a fantastic success, and now the Aztec Empire was cast well South all the way past the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Only Teotitlan and those impossibly stupid Tlaxcalans were still resisting, though they were paying some tribute and engaging in the flower wars now.. They would fall like all the others as they lost their best warriors to the sacrifice to the gods every time they participated in the flower wars[^cf8].