Now even though it's an alliance, over time, Tenochtitlan essentially becomes the capital of this alliance or the capital of this Aztec Empire, which continues on for roughly 100 years until 1521, when it is defeated by Hernando Cortes. Now the story of how Hernando Cortes is able to conquer this empire is fascinating, and I'm not going to be able to go into all of the details in this video, but needless to say, he's able to convince several hundred conquistadors to come and try to conquer the empire, and he's able to do so by recruiting tens of thousands, some estimates I've seen are 100,000 soldiers from neighboring city states who had issues with the Mexico or with the Aztec Empire, and so he's eventually able to take over the famed city of Tenochtitlan. And it's really important to recognize how advanced they were at the time. You see these causeways, these bridges, leading into the island. They had a fairly advanced dam system to collect fresh water from the rain while also to control flooding. In fact, a lot of that was destroyed when the conquistadors came in Mexico City, which eventually gets founded over this lake, is going to have issues with flooding for some time in the future. In fact, the Spanish, in order to control the flooding, end up draining this lake, and this is where Mexico City forms.