Moctezuma I

Under Moctezuma I, the fifth tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, the tribute empire created by the Triple Alliance expanded far beyond the Valley of Mexico for the first time. Known as Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, a name usually rendered "he who shoots arrows at the sky," he was a son of the second ruler Huitzilihuitl and, by tradition, of Miahuaxihuitl of Cuauhnahuac. Born around 1397, he had a long military career under his uncle Itzcoatl, whom he succeeded in 1440. Throughout his reign he governed in close partnership with Tlacaelel, the cihuacoatl or chief minister, a kinsman whom the chronicles treat as his brother or half-brother; the division of labor between the two men is described differently in different sources.

The early decades brought both war and catastrophe. A protracted struggle finally subdued Chalco, the long-standing rival in the southeastern lake basin, while a sequence of frosts and droughts culminating in the famine of the early 1450s devastated central Mexico. The recovery that followed saw Mexica armies campaign far afield: into the Huasteca on the Gulf coast, into Totonac territory, and southward against Coixtlahuaca and other Mixtec and Zapotec centers in Oaxaca, extending tribute obligations across hundreds of kilometers. The chronicles also place the formalization of the so-called flower wars with Tlaxcala and Huexotzinco in this period.

Within the capital, Moctezuma's reign produced lasting infrastructure: an aqueduct bringing spring water from Chapultepec, a great dike across the lake — built with Texcocan cooperation under Nezahualcoyotl — to protect the city from flooding and brackish water, and substantial enlargement of the Great Temple. Legal and sumptuary codes attributed to him sharpened the distinction between nobles and commoners.

His death in 1469, after a reign of nearly three decades, posed a succession question that the dynasty resolved in characteristic fashion. His daughter Atotoztli had married Tezozomoc, a son of Itzcoatl, uniting the two principal branches of Acamapichtli's descendants; the election passed to their son Axayacatl, a grandson of both former rulers. Two more of Atotoztli's sons, Tizoc and Ahuitzotl, ruled in turn after him, so that the three following reigns all flowed directly from Moctezuma's line. The dates given for his birth and reign, like all pre-conquest Mexica chronology, depend on colonial-era annals and remain approximate.