The Aztecs never conquered their western rival, the Purépecha kingdom
When the Spanish arrived, the second-largest state in Mesoamerica was not Aztec. It was the Purépecha kingdom of western Mexico, which beat back an Aztec invasion in the 1470s, fortified its frontier with garrison towns, and was among the few Mesoamerican peoples to make tools and even weapons from metal.
Its heartland was the Lake Pátzcuaro basin in today's Michoacán, a region of volcanic highlands and lake basins more than 2,000 metres up. The Aztecs called the area Michhuahcān, 'place of fisher folk', and the capital Tzintzuntzan means 'place of hummingbirds'. Much of what is known comes from the Relación de Michoacán, compiled around 1540 by a Franciscan friar from the oral histories of Purépecha nobles, though its section on religion survives only in part.
According to that account, a visionary leader named Tariácuri set out around 1300 to fuse the lakeside communities into a single state, placing his sons in charge of the towns of Ihuatzio and Tzintzuntzan. By his death around 1350 his lineage, known as the 'eagles', controlled every major centre on the lake. His successors built a bureaucracy, carved up tribute among lords and nobles, and pushed outward into the sierra and the Balsas River valley, reaching the Pacific at Zacatula by 1460.
The Aztec threat shaped the kingdom. After Axayacatl's forces seized frontier towns and were then defeated in the 1470s, the Purépecha ruler lined the border with military centres such as Cutzamala and invited Otomi and Matlatzinca refugees, themselves driven out by the Aztecs, to settle there if they helped defend it. Historians suggest this may have produced Mesoamerica's first truly territorial state. Not every campaign succeeded: a 30-year occupation of parts of Colima and Jalisco to control saltpetre mines ended with the Purépecha expelled.
The name Purépecha means commoners, literally 'those who stroll about the land'. The Spanish used Tarasco, from a word for in-law, reportedly because frightened locals addressed the newcomers that way to suggest marriage ties; many communities still dislike it. Independence ended in 1530, and in 1543 the kingdom became the governorship of Michoacán.
Source: Purépecha Empire
