Eagle and the Sun

In the year 1325, a wandering and despised people saw a sign their god had promised them — an eagle perched on a cactus, on an island in a highland lake — and there they raised a city. Within a hundred years the Mexica had turned that reed-bound refuge into Tenochtitlan, the dazzling capital of the greatest empire the Americas had ever known: a metropolis of a quarter-million souls, laced with can...