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Also essential to the Spanish conquest of Mexico is that the native Mexicans suffered horrendous deaths from smallpox, and also that many of the non-Aztec Mexican peoples were sick and tired of being oppressed by the brutal Aztec state. Tenoctitlan (now Mexico City) was a city of 200,000 people, as large as the largest European cities, and well defended (it was an island in the middle of a lake), so there was no way that Cortes’ small group of Spanish soldiers could have conquered it on their own.