Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/272

248 about thirty thousand households. There are in it, Sire, very wonderful houses, and mosques, and very large, and well built, oratories; it has also extensive market places. Besides this city, he possesses two others, one, called Ocurman, at three leagues from Tezcuco, and the other, called the greatest of its rulers, bore the title of Aculhua Tecutl, which Mexican historians define as equivalent to Caesar. This King once declared war upon Mexico over a trifling question of etiquette, sacked the capital, and exacted a heavy indemnity. The kingdom was divided into seventy-five principalities or lordships, something after the feudal system in Europe during the Middle Ages. The last king, before the arrival of the Spaniards, had been Nezahualpilli, a ruler of superior ability, one of the greatest princes in Mexican history, who left one hundred and forty-five children, of whom there were four sons eligible for the succession. The electors, under pressure of Montezuma, chose the eldest, with the result that the youngest, Ixtlitxochiti, contested the election, and plunged the country into civil strife from which it emerged divided, and in this weakened and distracted state Cortes found it upon his arrival. The ambitious Ixtlilxochiti, discontented with the portion he had received, was a permanent pretender to his brother's crown, and he secretly sent an embassy to Cortes at Cempoal asking his help, and offering his own alliance. This afforded Cortes an early insight into the internal dissensions of the empire, by which he so readily and ably profited. (Ixtlilxochitl. Hist. Chichineca.) Texcoco rapidly diminished both in population and importance after the conquest, and Thomas Gage, who visited it in 1626, found a village containing one hundred Spaniards and three hundred Indians, reduced to poverty. Great havoc had been wrought by the wanton destruction of the magnificent forests of giant cedar trees in the neighbourhood. Panfilo de Narvaez accused Cortes of using seven thousand cedar beams in the construction of his palace alone. (Voyage de Thomas Gage, Tom. i. cap. xiii).