Hernan Cortes may have originally come to Tenochtitlan to convert the Aztecs to Catholicism but, in the process of doing so, killed many of them and the indigenous with the smallpox disease. A year after Cortes’ arrival into the sophisticated city, an African slave who was infected with the disease arrived to serve in Tenochtitlan. Cortes’ men quickly caught the disease and so did the Aztecs; who were unfamiliar with the disease and had no immunity nor cure and therefore died by the thousands. At the time, Cortes was busy with a battle, while a Spanish priest commented on how “the Aztecs did not know the … disease, [and therefore] died in heaps, like bedbugs. In many places that everyone in a house died, and as it was impossible to bury the
