The former lords, now vassals, had clasped the Aztec viper to their breasts. Its fangs went straight into their hearts.
The Aztecs' migration began about AD 1100, swirling out from an ancestral home-land called Aztlan, "place of the herons."" Of Aztlan's true location nothing is known except that it lay northwest of Mexico City; perhaps it was as far away as the southwestern United States, perhaps as close as 60 miles to Tenochtitlan, their capital.
A group of migrants like these can scarcely be imagined. Huitzilopochtli was the Aztecs' god. Huitzilopochtli was a ferocious god who in the course of time had evolved from an earth-god of fertility into a symbol of militarism and imperialism associated with the sun. Guided by Huitzilopochtli, they ate low quality food, stole women, and took captives for human sacrifices to placate their god. The sun would not rise, they believed, unless Huitzilopochtli was nourished with hearts cut from the bodies of living men. .
The Aztecs' wanderings would come to an end, declared their god through the mouths of his priests, only when they arrived at the site that he had chosen at the start of time to be their capital. According to an Aztec chronicle, they would know this place by a sign: where the resting eagle "screams and spreads its wings and eats, and the serpent is torn apart."" .
Wherever the Aztecs went they were rejected as offensive and barbaric by the settled peoples they encountered. By 1168 they had reached the Valley of Mexico, skulking on its fringes. Feared by all, they trudged from place to place. Twice in 20 years they occupied the strategic hilltop heights of Chapultepec beside Lake Tetzcoco, and twice their annoyed neighbors threw them out.
By 1319, weary and discouraged, seemingly farther than ever from Huitzilopochtli's promise of riches and supremacy, they wandered into noble Colhuacan and sought shelter. The Colhua, needing mercenaries and fully aware of their uninvited guests' talent for slaughter, decided to keep the Aztecs usefully at hand.
