Smallpox had spread slowly over the summer…
December 1520 CE
Smallpox had spread slowly over the summer to Tepeaca and Tlaxcala, and to Tenochtitlán.
The Aztecs had been struck by a smallpox plague starting in September 1520, which had lasted seventy days and has devastated the Aztec population.
Many have been killed, including their new leader, the Emperor Cuitlahuac, who had died of the disease eighty days after assuming the throne.
It has killed most of the Aztec army and a quarter of the overall population.
The Spanish Franciscan Motolinia, who will arrive in Mexico four years later, will leave this description: "As the Indians did not know the remedy of the disease…they died in heaps, like bedbugs. In many places it happened that everyone in a house died and, as it was impossible to bury the great number of dead, they pulled down the houses over them so that their homes become their tombs."