Who ruled Mexico City?

Mexico City sits in the Valley of Mexico, a high basin more than 2,200 metres above sea level ringed by volcanoes, which until the colonial era held a chain of shallow lakes. Its history is defined by two capitals built on the same spot: Tenochtitlan, the island city of the Mexica, and the Spanish city raised on its ruins after 1521, which has been the seat of power in Mexico ever since. The struggle to live on a drained lake bed, with floods, sinking ground and earthquakes, runs through the whole story.

The valley was densely settled long before the Mexica arrived. About 40 kilometres to the north-east, Teotihuacan grew into one of the largest cities in the world in the first centuries CE, and after its decline the Toltec centre at Tula dominated the region. The Mexica were latecomers, a migrating people who, according to their own traditions, founded Tenochtitlan on a marshy island in Lake Texcoco around 1325. A sister city, Tlatelolco, grew on a neighbouring island and was absorbed in 1473.

In 1428 Tenochtitlan joined Texcoco and Tlacopan in the Triple Alliance, the league usually called the Aztec Empire. Tribute flowed into the island city from much of central and southern Mexico. Causeways linked it to the shore, an aqueduct brought fresh water from Chapultepec, and a dyke separated the fresh water around the city from the salty eastern lake. By the early 1500s Tenochtitlan probably held 200,000 people or more, and its sacred precinct was crowned by the Templo Mayor, the twin temple to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc.

Hernán Cortés entered the city in November 1519 as a guest of Moctezuma II, was driven out in mid-1520, and returned with tens of thousands of Indigenous allies to besiege it. Weakened by smallpox and starvation, the city fell on 13 August 1521 (see the fall of Tenochtitlan). Cortés chose to build the new Spanish capital on the rubble, laying out a grid around a great central square where the Metropolitan Cathedral and the viceregal palace later stood.

From 1535 Mexico City was the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the richest of Spain's American possessions, with a university founded in 1551 and a printing press from the 1530s. Water remained the city's enemy. A flood in 1629 left much of the centre under water for about five years, and colonial engineers spent generations cutting drainage channels to empty the lakes, a project only completed in the twentieth century.

Independence came in 1821, when the Army of the Three Guarantees marched into the capital. The young republic's capital was occupied by United States troops in 1847 and by French forces in 1863, who installed Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor until his defeat in 1867 restored Benito Juárez. During the Revolution of 1910 to 1920 rival armies, including those of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, passed through and fought in the streets.

The twentieth century turned a city of a few hundred thousand into one of the largest urban areas on earth, as migrants poured in from the countryside. It hosted the 1968 Olympics, days after soldiers killed protesters at Tlatelolco, and was devastated by the earthquake of 19 September 1985, which killed thousands and discredited the government's response. In 2016 the old Federal District was renamed Mexico City and became a self-governing federal entity, comparable to a state. Today the city proper holds about 9 million people and the wider metropolitan area more than 20 million, and it remains the political, financial and cultural capital of Mexico.