La Noche Triste

June 30, 1520

On a rain-slashed night the Mexica rose against Cortes and drove the Spaniards and their Tlaxcalan allies from Tenochtitlan across the Tlacopan causeway. Hundreds of conquistadors, weighed down with looted gold, drowned in the lake. Cortes sat beneath a cypress and, the story goes, wept openly. The disaster cost Cortes most of his artillery and men, but within a year he had rebuilt his army and besieged Tenochtitlan.