Page:Vol 2 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/43

Rh Meanwhile Nezahualpilli had died without naming a successor, and the council, influenced by Montezuma, set aside the claims of an elder brother and declared Cacama king. Actuated both by personal ambition and patriotic resentment against Aztec interference, Ixtlilxochitl denounced the electors as tools of the imperial intriguer. Finding his protests unheeded, he began to interest the interior provinces in his own behalf, by applying patriotic arguments, and in 1517 he descended from Meztitlan with a force estimated at a hundred thousand men. Everything yielded before him, and one of the foremost Aztec generals was defeated and captured. More than one adjoining principality now pronounced in favor of the great captain, while the Aztec monarch neglected to sustain Cacama, under the pressure of troubles in his own provinces, and of ominous incidents supported by the arrival off the eastern coast of mysterious waterhouses with white-bearded occupants — the expeditions of Córdoba and Grijalva. Thus abandoned, Cacama hastened to make terms with his brother, who declared that the campaign was directed wholly against Montezuma, but nevertheless exacted the northern half of the kingdom for himself. The terms may be regarded as moderate on the part of an irresistible general. Ixtlilxochitl must have had strong motives for contenting himself with a half, for he dreamed no longer of regal power alone, but of overthrowing the hated Aztecs, whose strength seemed already waning, and thus achieving immortal renown as the savior of his country, a project which afterward would have expanded into the more ambitious one of founding a new Chichimec empire. The present moderation was intended to extend his influence to the furtherance of these schemes, and to assure them by a more steady growth, unhampered by jealous intrigue. The appearance of the Spaniards, while affording him the much desired assistance, brought him in contact with schemers equally ambitious, but stronger and more