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Historical person
1476–1520
Cuitláhuac was an Aztec ruler and brother of Moctezuma II who briefly governed Tenochtitlan in 1520. He helped lead resistance that drove the Spaniards from the city during La Noche Triste, but died during the smallpox epidemic before the final siege.
Cuitláhuac succeeded Moctezuma II during the crisis of 1520 and helped lead the Mexica counterattack that drove the Spaniards from Tenochtitlan on the Noche Triste; he died of smallpox only months into his reign.
Gary Jennings’s Aztec brings Cuitláhuac into Mixtli’s eyewitness account of the destruction of the Mexica imperial world. After Moctezuma’s seizure and death, Mixtli witnesses Cuitláhuac’s brief rule, the expulsion of the Spaniards from Tenochtitlan and the epidemic that devastates the city before the final siege. Cuitláhuac’s short reign is therefore presented not as an isolated succession but as one phase in the rapid sequence of resistance, disease and political collapse that culminates under Cuauhtémoc.
Series
The Aztec sequence follows Indigenous and mixed-ancestry protagonists through five centuries of Mexican history, from the height of Tenochtitlan to the wars that ended Spanish rule. The first novel gives Mixtli’s account of the empire under Ahuitzotl and Moctezuma II and carries his life into the conquest. Later…
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