Fall of Tula

Tula Grande had been the largest city of central Mexico since about 900. From around 1000, according to archaeologists, leached soils and a drying climate strained it, and the drying of their northern homelands drove Chichimec groups south, bringing ethnic strife. Many residential quarters were abandoned by about 1150. The ceremonial centre was burned — the Burnt Palace takes its name from the evidence — and the pyramids were wrecked; the date is uncertain, but dates from burned stucco of the Burnt Palace point to around 1140 or, in a more recent series, around 1175, and the Tollan phase of the city's heyday is thought to have ended about 1150. Recent studies suggest that most of the temples, neighbourhood temples and council halls were burned in a deliberate ritual of termination.

The fall was long imagined as a catastrophe: Jorge Acosta, who excavated Tula from 1940, reconstructed a sack and burning of the city by invading Mexica groups, followed by its depopulation. Later research by Juan Yadeun pointed to considerable continuity: there was no catastrophic depopulation of the urban area, and in Tula's hinterland, although the provincial centres were deserted, most villages remained inhabited — by one estimate about 60% of the population stayed; the revised chronology of Dan Healan, Robert Cobean and Robert Bowsher, however, suggests that for some time after the fall the city itself had no substantial resident population. Internal causes are now thought likely: a political crisis and conflict between factions competing to rule the city, and the exhaustion of a political order in which the cult of the Feathered Serpent and the idea of Tollan legitimised ruling elites across Mesoamerica.

Ruling lineages left Tula for other parts of Mesoamerica; some settled at Culhuacan in the south of the Valley of Mexico, whose dynasty, claiming Toltec descent, later gave the Mexica their first tlatoani. For the Aztecs Tollan became the legendary model of civilisation, and their chronicles told of its fall: in one version the priest-king Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, tricked by the god Tezcatlipoca, left the city for the Gulf coast — though other chronologies place his departure in the 10th century; in another the last king, Huemac, wandered with a dwindling band of followers and died in a cave at Chapultepec. Chronologies built from these accounts disagree: Huemac's move to Chapultepec is traditionally dated to 1156 or 1168, one reconstruction dates the destruction of Tula to around 1179, and the dates given for Huemac's death range from the 1090s to the 1170s; the historical value of the legends is disputed.