Tenochtitlan
The Mexica settled an island in Lake Texcoco in 1325, where tradition holds they saw an eagle on a cactus eating a serpent.
By 1500 it held perhaps 200,000 people — larger than any European city of the day — fed by chinampas, supplied by aqueduct and connected by causeways.
The conquest
Cortés arrived in 1519 with a few hundred Spaniards and left with tens of thousands of indigenous allies, chiefly Tlaxcalans who had been at war with the Mexica for generations.
Smallpox reached the city in 1520. The siege ran from May to August 1521, and Cuauhtémoc, the last emperor, was captured at Tlatelolco on 13 August.
The Spanish built their capital on the same spot with the same stone.
New Spain
Three centuries as the capital of a viceroyalty reaching from California to Central America and across the Pacific to Manila.
The Manila galleon brought Asian silk, porcelain and lacquer through Acapulco. Mexican silver funded the Spanish empire and circulated as far as China.
The city flooded repeatedly — the 1629 flood lasted five years — and the draining of the lake began, a project that ran for three centuries.
Independence
Hidalgo issued the Grito de Dolores in 1810; independence was achieved in 1821 after eleven years of war.
The following decades were catastrophic: the loss of Texas in 1836, the war with the United States in 1846–48 which cost half the national territory, and the French intervention that installed Maximilian as emperor from 1864 until his execution in 1867.
Benito Juárez, an indigenous Zapotec lawyer, led the resistance and the reform.
Porfirio Díaz
Thirty-five years of dictatorship from 1876, which brought railways, electricity, drainage and Bellas Artes, and concentrated land and wealth to a degree that produced what followed.
The Revolution
1910 to 1920, and around a million dead. Zapata and Villa entered Mexico City in 1914 and were photographed in the presidential chair.
The Constitution of 1917 followed, and with it land reform, and the mural movement — Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros painting the new national story on public walls, which is why the city’s greatest art is on the sides of government buildings.
The megacity
The population went from around 1.5 million in 1940 to over 20 million. Industry, then the collapse of rural agriculture, drove enormous internal migration.
The 1968 Olympics were preceded ten days earlier by the Tlatelolco massacre.
The 1985 earthquake killed thousands and, through the failure of the government’s response and the self-organisation of ordinary people, changed Mexican civil society permanently.
The PRI governed nationally for 71 years until 2000. Mexico City has elected its own mayor since 1997 and became a full federal entity, CDMX, in 2016.