Moctezuma's name meant 'he frowns like a lord', and he ruled accordingly
In Classical Nahuatl, Moctezuma joins a word for lord with a verb meaning to frown in anger. The ninth Aztec emperor lived up to it, purging his court and barring commoners from palace service. Remembered mostly as the ruler Cortés overthrew, he also presided over the empire at its largest and steered it through a three-year famine.
He came from the heart of the dynasty. Moctezuma I was his great-grandfather, his father was the emperor Axayácatl, and his uncles Tízoc and Ahuizotl held the throne before him. The Aztecs never used regnal numbers; historians added the 'II' later. His chroniclers called him Xocoyotzin, the honoured young one. Enrolled in the calmecac, the school for nobles, probably around age five, he grew into a celebrated warrior and chief priest of Huitzilopochtli's temple, and around 1490 won the rank of tequihua by capturing at least four enemy commanders.
His coronation date is disputed. Most records point to 1502, though a carved stone now in the Art Institute of Chicago bears a date matching 15 July 1503. Once crowned, he added 38 provincial divisions staffed by officials backed by garrisons to collect tax, enforce law and settle disputes. Campaigns pushed the frontier south to Xoconosco in Chiapas and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and brought the Zapotec and Yopi peoples under Aztec rule.
Disaster struck early. A drought in 1505 wrecked harvests across central Mexico, and the famine lasted three years. Refugees fled to Totonacapan, which had escaped the drought, and maize was hauled back from there. Moctezuma and the rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan opened food stores, and when desperate nobles sold their children into slavery, he had the criminal court free them and feed the families. The crisis also ended huehuetlatlacolli, a form of hereditary serfdom.
His reign saw the first meeting between Mesoamerica and Europeans, and it ended when Hernán Cortés and his men seized Tenochtitlan in 1520. How Moctezuma died, and at whose hands, is told differently in different accounts. Spanish writers painted him as weak and indecisive, while his contemporaries were split between those who saw a great conqueror holding the empire together and those who saw a tyrant grasping at absolute power.
Source: Moctezuma II
