"In 1371 the birth of Niccolo Machiavelli was 102 years in the future. In that year, a Prince mounted the throne of the Tepanec city of Azcapotzalco on the shores of the sapphire-blue Lake Texcoco in Central Mexico. Tezozomoc (Angry Stone Face) would rule for 56 years and create in that lifetime an empire not seen in Mexico for 300 years, since the glory of great Tollan. He would demonstrate every skill and guile of war and statecraft, for the mere writing of which Machiavelli would later be branded infamous—and taken seriously. If the famous Florentine had already known, his model for the ultimate warrior-statesman, whom he had unwitting described in The Prince, had already grown old and died. He was remembered as:
‘. . . a shrewd military strategist who also made effective use of flattery, bribery, assassination and treachery in a career worthy of a Machiavelli. Here, no less than in Renaissance Italy, the pragmatic aims of politics were never confused with idealism, much less with morality. But also like the tyrants of the Italian states, this ruler's accomplishments and fortunes were interwoven with the changing life a civilization.'
For the empire Tezozomoc built would be inherited not by his own seed but by his favoured vassals, the Mexica, who learned the lessons of empire at the knee of this great Tepanec lord. It would be the Mexica, in their magnificent capital of Tenochtitlan in the centre of Lake Texcoco, close by Tezozomoc's capital of Azcapotzalco, who would inspire the final flourish of native Mexican civilisation before the coming of Cortés…"
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