Tizatlan, in pre-Columbian Mexico, was one of the four independent altepemeh (polities, sing. altepetl) that constituted the confederation of Tlaxcallan. Today Tizatlan is a part of the modern city of Tlaxcala, and the Pre-Columbian city is visible as a small archaeological site. The site is in the state of Tlaxcala in central Mexico.
Tizatlan was the third of the four altepemeh to be founded, but at the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico it was, along with Ocotelolco, the most powerful of the four allied communities. Where Ocotelolco held the economical power, having the main market in the region, Tizatlan had the military power and commanded the Tlaxcallan armies.
When the Spanish arrived in Mexico Tizatlan was ruled by the aging Xicotencatl I "the Elder" aided by his son the military leader Xicotencatl II "the Younger". Through a series of political events Ocotelolco finally achieved dominance over Tizatlan at the end of the conquest.
Tlaxcala, officially Tlaxcala de Xicohténcatl, is the capital city of the Mexican state of Tlaxcala and seat of the municipality of the same name. The city did not exist during the pre Hispanic period but was laid out by the Spanish as a center of evangelization and governance after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. It was designated as a diocese but eventually lost this status to Puebla as its population declined. The city still has many of its old colonial structures including the former Franciscan monastery, as well as newer civic structures such as the Xicohtencatl Theatre.
The Nahuas are a group of the indigenous people of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. They comprise the largest indigenous group in Mexico and second largest in El Salvador. The Aztecs were of Nahua ethnicity, and the Toltecs are often thought to have been as well, though in the pre-Columbian period Nahuas were subdivided into many groups that did not necessarily share a common identity.
Tlaxcala, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Tlaxcala, is one of the 32 states which comprise the Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 60 municipalities and its capital city is Tlaxcala.
Miguel León-Portilla was a Mexican anthropologist and historian.
Tlacopan, also called Tacuba, was a Mexica altepetl on the western shore of Lake Texcoco. The site is today the neighborhood of Tacuba, in Mexico City.
The Tlaxcalans, or Tlaxcaltecs, are a Nahua people who live in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala.
The altepetl was the local, ethnically-based political entity, usually translated into English as "city-state," in pre-Columbian societies in the Americas. The altepetl was constituted of smaller units known as calpolli and was typically led by a single dynastic ruler known as a tlatoani, although examples of shared rule between up to five rulers are known. Each altepetl had its own jurisdiction, origin story, and served as the center of Indigenous identity. Residents referred to themselves by the name of their altepetl rather than, for instance, as "Mexicas." "Altepetl" was a polyvalent term rooting the social and political order in the creative powers of a sacred mountain that contained the ancestors, seeds and life-giving forces of the community. The word is a combination of the Nahuatl words ātl and tepētl. A characteristic Nahua mode was to imagine the totality of the people of a region or of the world as a collection of altepetl units and to speak of them on those terms. The concept is comparable to Maya cah and Mixtec ñuu. Altepeme formed a vast complex network which predated and outlasted larger empires, such as the Aztec and Tarascan state.
The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, also known as the Conquest of Mexico or the Spanish-Aztec War (1519–21), was one of the primary events in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. There are multiple 16th-century narratives of the events by Spanish conquistadors, their indigenous allies, and the defeated Aztecs. It was not solely a contest between a small contingent of Spaniards defeating the Aztec Empire but rather the creation of a coalition of Spanish invaders with tributaries to the Aztecs, and most especially the Aztecs' indigenous enemies and rivals. They combined forces to defeat the Mexica of Tenochtitlan over a two-year period. For the Spanish, the expedition to Mexico was part of a project of Spanish colonization of the New World after twenty-five years of permanent Spanish settlement and further exploration in the Caribbean.
The traditions of indigenous Mesoamerican literature extend back to the oldest-attested forms of early writing in the Mesoamerican region, which date from around the mid-1st millennium BCE. Many of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica are known to have been literate societies, who produced a number of Mesoamerican writing systems of varying degrees of complexity and completeness. Mesoamerican writing systems arose independently from other writing systems in the world, and their development represents one of the very few such origins in the history of writing. The conquistadors brought their distinctive cultural creations, in the form of books, from Europe to the New World which further influenced native literature.
Tlaxcala was a pre-Columbian city and state in central Mexico.
Tlaxcala is a Mexican state.
Fray Ángel María Garibay Kintana was a Mexican Roman Catholic priest, philologist, linguist, historian, and scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, specifically of the Nahua peoples of the central Mexican highlands. He is particularly noted for his studies and translations of conquest-era primary source documents written in Classical Nahuatl, the lingua franca of Postclassic central Mexico and the then-dominant Aztec empire. Alongside his former student Miguel León-Portilla, Garibay ranks as one of the pre-eminent Mexican authorities on the Nahuatl language and its literary heritage, and as one who has made a significant contribution towards the promotion and preservation of the indigenous cultures and languages of Mexico.
Xaltocan was a pre-Columbian city-state and island in the Valley of Mexico, located in the center of Lake Xaltocan, part of an interconnected shallow lake system which included Lake Texcoco; this place is inside the San Miguel Jaltocan in Nextlapan. The site was originally settled by the Otomi people but following a war in the late fourteenth century where the Otomi were defeated by an alliance of Tepanecs and Mexica the Otomi were driven off the island and relocated to Otumba, Metztitlan and Tlaxcala. The island of Xaltocan was then resettled by Nahuatl speakers. The name can mean either of two things in the Nahuatl language: either 'sandy ground of spiders' or 'where sand sowing'.
Xicotencatl I or Xicotencatl the Elder was a long-lived tlatoani (king) of Tizatlan, a Nahua altepetl within the pre-Columbian confederacy of Tlaxcala, in what is now Mexico.
Maxixcatl was the tlatoani (ruler) of the Nahua altepetl (city-state) of Ocotelolco at the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
Xicotencatl II Axayacatl, also known as Xicotencatl the Younger, was a prince and warleader, probably with the title of Tlacochcalcatl, of the pre-Columbian state of Tlaxcallan at the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
Ocotelolco, in pre-Columbian Mexico, was one of the four independent altepetl (polities) that constituted the confederation of Tlaxcallan. The site is in the present day state of Tlaxcala in central Mexico.
Tlatelolco was a pre-Columbian altepetl, or city-state, in the Valley of Mexico. Its inhabitants, known as the Tlatelolca, were part of the Mexica, a Nahuatl-speaking people who arrived in what is now central Mexico in the 13th century. The Mexica settled on an island in Lake Texcoco and founded the altepetl of Mexico-Tenochtitlan on the southern portion of the island. In 1337, a group of dissident Mexica broke away from the Tenochca leadership in Tenochtitlan and founded Mexico-Tlatelolco on the northern portion of the island. Tenochtitlan was closely tied with its sister city, which was largely dependent on the market of Tlatelolco, the most important site of commerce in the area.
The pre-Columbian history of the territory now making up the country of Mexico is known through the work of archaeologists and epigraphers, and through the accounts of Spanish conquistadores, settlers and clergymen as well as the indigenous chroniclers of the immediate post-conquest period.
Mesa de Cacahuatenco is a Mesoamerican pre-Columbian archeological site, located in the municipality of Ixhuatlán de Madero in northern Veracruz, Mexico, south of the Vinasca River.
![]() | Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tlaxcallan culture . |