Much of this has changed since the Spaniards first saw it.  Cortes tried all ordinary means to overcome the desperate obstinacy with which the Aztecs defended their capital.  The Spaniards conquered wherever they went; but, as they moved forward, the Mexicans closed in again behind, and from every house-top showers of darts, arrows, and stones were poured down upon them.  Cortes resolved upon the utter demolition of the city.  He was grieved to destroy it, he said, for it was the most beautiful thing in the whole world; but there was no alternative.  He moved slowly towards the great teocalli, his fifty thousand Tlascalan allies following him, throwing down every house, and filling the canals with the ruins.  When the conquest was finished, but one district of the city was left standing, and in it were crowded a quarter of the population, miserable famished wretches, who had surrendered when their king was taken.  All that was left besides was a patch of swampy ground strewed with fragments of walls, a few pyramids too large for present destruction, and such great heaps of dead bodies that it was impossible to get from place to place without walking over them.

Cortes had resolved that a new city should be built, but it was not so easy to decide where it was to be.  The Aztecs, it seemed, had not originally established themselves on the spot where Mexico was built.  When they came down from the north country, and across the hills into the valley of Mexico, they were but an insignificant tribe, and as yet mere savages.  They settled down in one place after another, and were always driven out by the persecutions of the neighbouring tribes.  At last they took possession of a little group of swampy islands in the lake of Tezcuco; and then at last, safe from their enemies, they increased and multiplied, and became a great and powerful nation.

The first beginnings of Mexico, a cluster of huts built on wooden piles, must have borne some likeness to those curious settlements of early tribes in the shallow part of the lakes of Switzerland and the British Isles, of which numerous remains are still to be found.  As the nation increased in numbers, Tenochtitlan, as the inhabitants called their city (they called themselves Tenochques), came to be a great city of houses built on piles, with canals running through the straight streets, along which the natives poled their flat-bottomed canoes.  The name which the Spaniards gave to the city, the “Venice of the New World,” was appropriate, not only to its situation in the midst of the water, with canals for thoroughfares, but also to the history of the causes which led to its being built in such a situation.

The habit of building houses upon piles, which was first forced upon the people by the position they had chosen, was afterwards followed as a matter of taste, just as it is in Holland.  Even after the Aztecs became masters of the surrounding country, they built towns round the lake, partly on the shore, and partly on piles in the water.  The Spanish chroniclers mention Iztapalapan, and many other towns, as built in this way.  Like the Swiss tribes, the early inhabitants of Mexico depended much upon their fishing, for which their position gave them great facilities.