This situation rapidly changed as he became a despot at the center of highly intricate court ceremonies. No one was permitted to look upon him. One had to come before him with eyes lowered. No one could touch him. The few who had the right to visit him had to enter barefoot, performing a series of genuflections and calling him Lord, "My Lord, My Great Lord."[3].
Throughout the first seventeen years of Moctezuma's reign, the empire was plagued with constant uprisings of peoples who had been harshly subjugated by the Aztecs and wished to escape the tributes required of them. Moctezuma left the consolidation of his empire up to his generals while he devoted his time to worldly pleasures and religious duties in Tenochtitlan.
The Spanish.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, another great empire had recently accomplished a consolidation of its own. Spain had successfully completed the Reconquista. Finding a solid Muslim wall to the south in Northern Africa and the powerful French kingdom to the north, the only direction that the Spanish saw in which to expand was to the west. The popes had intentionally given sovereignty over any new lands discovered to the Portuguese; but with the advent of Columbus's discovery, the Spanish wished to end this legacy of Portuguese favoritism in the Vatican. Papal bulls of the 1450s had declared that the Portuguese had rights to any lands "as far as the Indies,"[4] which actually gave Portugal the rights to the discovery of America.
In 1493, after Columbus's first voyage, Spain sent envoys to the pope demanding that he give Spain the rights to Columbus's discoveries, as the past popes had given the Portuguese the rights to Africa and lands to the east. The new pope, Alexander VI (pope from 1492 to 1503), being a Spanish Borgia himself, acknow-ledged these previous "injustices" and issued a series of four bulls that established the papacy as an adamantly pro-Spanish power.